EAST LANSING, Mich. — A graduate student recently was awarded the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship.
Vanessa Hull, a doctoral candidate in the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, will receive $30,000 per year for up to three years to pursue her research on how animals choose a home that can best meet their needs to survive – and how those needs intersect with its human neighbors.
"The NASA Fellowship is another well-deserved recognition of Vanessa’s exceptional talent and innovative work," said Jianguo "Jack" Liu, Hull’s advisor and an internationally known human-environment scientist and sustainability scholar who holds the Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability and is the center’s director.
Hull will be using detailed information on how the endangered giant pandas move through their territories in southwestern China, combined with information gleaned from remotely sensed imagery, habitat characteristics and interviews with people who share pandas’ neighborhoods.
NASA reviewers noted that her work has "broad application to the field of animal behavior, remote sensing and landscape ecology and biodiversity conservation."
The Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability works in the innovative new field of coupled human and natural systems to find sustainable solutions that both benefit the environment and enable people to thrive.
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