About Dr Lucy Spelman

Lucy Spelman DVM (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine), DACZM (Diplomat of the American College of Zoological Medicine) is one of a handful of board-certified zoological medicine specialists in the world. She has an undergraduate degree in biology from Brown University and a degree in veterinary medicine from the University of California, Davis.

During her tenure as the first woman and youngest person to head the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, she brought two giant pandas to the United States from China and launched a ten-year exhibit and facilities renewal project. She worked as a consultant for Animal Planet before moving to central Africa to run the field program for the Gorilla Doctors, which monitors the health of gorillas in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park and Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she teaches biology and conservation to art and design students. She is the author of forty scientific papers, Creature Needs: Artists Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation, the National Geographic Animal Encyclopedia, and The Rhino with Glue-on Shoes.

Animals have always been part of her life, and her experiences with them include taking care of giant pandas in China, mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and river otters in Guyana.

She has worked as a zoo veterinarian, a zoo director, a wildlife veterinarian, a media consultant, a writer, and an educator. In addition to various scientific articles, she is the author of the "National Geographic Kids’ Animal Encyclopedia," and co-editor of a book of short stories, "The Rhino with Glue-on Shoes."

After receiving her bachelor's degree in biology at Brown University (1985), Dr Spelman earned her veterinary degree from the University of California at Davis (1990), completed a one-year internship in small animal medicine at Ettinger and Associates in Los Angeles, California, and a three-year residency in Zoological Medicine at North Carolina State University in Raleigh in North Carolina. In 1994, she received her board certification from the American College of Zoological Medicine. She worked for the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoo for nearly a decade (1995-2004), first as Associate Veterinarian, then Head Veterinarian, and then Director. She was a media consultant for Discovery Communications in 2005 and then moved to Rwanda where she served as the Field Manager for Gorilla Doctors/Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project (2006-2009). She returned to the United States to teach at Brown University as Visiting Assistant Professor in 2009, and then moved on to the Rhode Island School of Design where she has taught biology to art and design students since 2010. She has worked as a clinician at Ocean State Veterinary Specialists since January 2011. In 2015, she launched Creature Conserve, Inc. and in 2018 she became a National Geographic Explorer and Expert for Great Apes of Rwanda and Uganda.

As part-time Faculty at RISD, Dr Spelman has developed multiple new biology-courses: Biology of Human-Animal Interactions, Evolutionary Biology, Art of Communicating Science, Comparative Anatomy, Exploring the Art and Science of Biodiversity: Guyana, Art and Science of Conservation: South Africa, Living Systems Lab, and Visual Stories of Natural Histories. Her teaching goal is to give students the opportunity to learn the science behind a topic first, and then apply it to their work in the studio.

She is especially interested in finding new ways to make scientific information about the ongoing loss of biodiversity more real, understandable, and meaningful.

Books