Our Students

Hi! My name is Katie-Ann Fu, and I am a veterinary student in the Class of 2027 with an interest in wildlife conservation and pathology. In the summer of 2025, I had the opportunity of traveling to Uganda to work with the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI). Together with JGI partners, we worked at the forefront of One Health as we collaborated with local communities in addressing human, wildlife, and environmental health.
 
Through this experience, I witnessed the different angles of conservation: veterinary and clinical medicine, environmental health monitoring, and human-wildlife conflict surveillance. We engaged with local communities as we conducted interviews for Village Conservation Monitors to partake in JGI’s IMPACT project in restoring degraded riverbanks and forest zones within the River Nkusi catchment. This project emphasizes the importance of a collaborative approach, not only achieving community empowerment by engaging various stakeholders in conservation efforts, but also enabling the passage of sustainable conservation interventions into daily practices.

 This transdisciplinary experience opened my eyes to the collaborative nature of One Health as well as the challenges and rewards of conservation. Through the Engaged Cornell program, I was able to experience such a beautiful country and its people and affirm my career interest in wildlife conservation while advancing the future of the animal-environment-human interface.