Vanessa Hull

Vanessa Hull, 25, has been fascinated by animals and where they have lived since she was a child. A native of Branford, Conn., she majored in animal behavior and minored in Chinese studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. 

She honed her Chinese language skills with an intense study program in Beijing and had a field study experience in environmental policy, wildlife management and wildlife ecology in Nairobi, Kenya.

She came to Michigan State’s panda project at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability in 2004 to study with Jianguo “Jack” Liu. Here, she earned a Master of Science in fisheries and wildlife, studying how captive pandas adjust to living in enclosed training areas in the natural habitat with an eye on someday releasing pandas into the wild at the Wolong Nature Reserve.

Hull now is working on a Ph.D. in Liu’s center. She is an National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and MSU University Distinguished Fellow. Her dissertation is “The use of GPS Collars to Track the Behavior of Giant Pandas in the Wild.”