Veronica Frans

Veronica Frans is a quantitative ecologist and a fifth-year PhD candidate in Fisheries & Wildlife and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology & Behavior at Michigan State University (MSU). She has bachelor's degrees in Environmental Science and French (Messiah University), and dual master's degrees in International Nature Conservation (Goettingen University, Germany and Lincoln University, New Zealand). She specializes in ecology, geographic information systems, programming, statistics, 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. Her longest research project was for the conservation of the world's rarest sea lion, the New Zealand sea lion. As a result of her travels, she can also speak 6 languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and German).

Currently, Veronica is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and University Enrichment Fellow at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) with Dr. Jianguo "Jack" Liu. She studies human influence on species distributions.