Congratulations to Quinn Molloy for successfully defending her dissertation, which is titled: Auto-dependency, Equity, and Place: A comprehensive assessment of household spending on transportation in the United States.
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Yunhe Cui successfully defends her dissertation
Congratulations to Yunhe Cui for successfully defending her dissertation, which is titled: Bike-sharing: Towards Equitable Urban Transportation.
Big News for Geography: CLAS adds Two New Departments
The UConn Board of Trustees voted at its meeting on Feb. 29 to establish a new department merging the Department of Geography with Urban and Community Studies and providing an administrative home for Environmental Studies.
The new Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies (GSCU) will draw on existing research and teaching strengths to address interdisciplinary issues in geography, environment, and sustainability.
The other new department is the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry, which will join four units: American Studies Program, Asian and Asian American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.
Both new departments will be effective as of July 1, and they are set to launch at the beginning of the fall semester.
Congcong Miao Awarded AAG Specialty Group Travel Award
Congratulations to Congcong Miao for earning an AAG Travel Award from the Applied Geography Specialty Group of the AAG. Explore Congcong’s winning paper, Assessing Network-Based Traffic Crash Risk using Prospective Space-Time Scan Statistic Method.
Quinn Molloy: Blending Geography and Engineering to Explore Transportation Inequity
Recent graduate Quinn Molloy (PhD, 2024) found that found that Black households spend more on transportation than white households.
The study, published in the journal Transportation Research Record by recent Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies graduate Quinn Molloy ’24 Ph.D., evaluated the impact of car dependency on equity and sustainability in the United States.
Molloy and her colleagues wrote about their findings in their analysis “Black Households Are More Burdened by Vehicle Ownership than White Households.” They showed that while the country’s transportation system comes at a high cost all around, it is especially burdensome for Black Americans.
“It is intuitive that people in the United States who have had systemically suppressed income, who have had to bear the larger burden of transportation infrastructure running through segregated neighborhoods have different and worse outcomes when it comes to transportation spending,” Molloy says. “It’s not so surprising.”
Molloy, who took an interdisciplinary approach to her dissertation working with Carol Atkinson-Palombo, a professor of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies; and Norman Garrick, an emeritus professor in the College of Engineering, said working across the two disciplines allowed her to look more holistically at how infrastructure “impacts people in the real world and how things like transportation planning and transportation engineering are not math puzzles.”
“They are human beings with lives that are impacted by the world that is built for them, and that is really important,” Molloy says.
Congcong Miao Wins 2024 AASHTO GIS-T Student Paper Award
Congratulations to Congcong Miao, a PhD student in Geography, who has won the 2024 GIS-T Symposium Student Paper Contest hosted by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO).