Student Spotlight: Jessica Fry
Contact: Andy McGlashen, News Writer for Environmental Science and Policy Program: (517) 432-3823 or mcglash3@msu.edu
November 19, 2008
For new ESPP student Jessica Fry, it was a busy beginning to this fall semester.
Just four days before arriving in East Lansing, Fry was in the Netherlands – where she was born and has spent much of her life – successfully defending her master’s thesis, which concerned new methods of regulating hog manure.
She earned her bachelor’s in ecology and biodiversity from the University of Amsterdam, and worked for a short time as a police officer in that city, but “missed the science component” of her education, and went back to earn a master’s degree in forensic science.
While at Michigan State last fall, taking advantage of a University of Amsterdam policy that allows students to fulfill elective requirements abroad, Fry met Carole Gibbs, an assistant professor of criminal justice. Gibbs sparked her interest in conservation criminology, an emerging field that draws on multiple disciplines to examine environmental crimes, harms and risks.
“If I hadn’t met her I wouldn’t have known how to proceed from there,” she said of Gibbs.
Fry said she’s broadly interested in environmental crime, and hopes to narrow her focus as she gets accustomed to “the social science thinking in the Criminal Justice program.” And given her educational background, she said, she’s eager to get to know ESPP students and faculty who study agriculture.
