Veronica Frans

Veronica Frans

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Ph.D. Student
Department of Fisheries and Wildlife

Email:

Major Advisor:

Jianguo "Jack" Liu


Background:

Veronica has degrees in the environmental sciences, French (BS/BA at Messiah College) and International Nature Conservation (MSc. at Goettingen University, Germany). She specializes in ecology, geographic information systems, programing, ecological modeling, and community outreach and engagement.

Veronica has lived, studied and worked in many different places around the world, mainly focusing on marine environments and emphasizing the importance of local knowledge and working with stakeholders and decision-makers to accomplish mutual goals for conservation. She has conducted research on commercial fishing vessels in Alaska, assisted in dolphin population monitoring in Hong Kong, and worked with local communities in the Falkland Islands to study whales. As a result of her travels, she can also speak 6 languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and German).

Currently, Veronica is a fifth-year PhD Candidate in Fisheries & Wildlife and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology & Behavior. She is also in MSU’s Community Engaged Scholarship, Spatial Ecology and Modeling Environmental and Social Systems certification programs. She is an NSF GRFP Fellow and University Enrichment Fellow and works at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) with Dr. Jianguo (Jack) Liu. She is also part of the Klausmeier-Litchman lab at MSU's Kellogg Biological Station. She studies human influence on species distributions.