GSCU hiring Visiting Assistant Professor

April 30, 2025

The Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies (GCSU) at the University of Connecticut invites applications for a Visiting Assistant Professor position. This position will begin on August 23, 2025, and will be located at the UConn Storrs campus.

The ideal candidate will bring college-level teaching experience in a wide range of courses in environmental studies, human geography, and urban and community studies. This is a teaching-oriented position. The successful candidate will offer a range of classes, potentially including common curriculum courses in Introduction to Environmental Studies, Globalization, World Regional Geography, Economic Geography, as well as upper division classes in Global Environmental Politics and Environmental and Climate Justice.

More information (including how to apply) can be found here:  https://jobs.hr.uconn.edu/en-us/job/499031/visiting-assistant-professor.

GSCU students receive 2025 UConn SURF Awards

March 25, 2025

Congratulations to GIS major Katherine Patrick and UCS minor Rafe Kimball for each receiving a 2025 Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF) Award.

Katherine will work with faculty mentor Dr. Dan Wanyama on a project titled:  Proposing Spatially Explicit Land Suitability Models for Orphan Crops to Support Food Security Initiatives in East Africa.

Rafe Kimball will work with faculty mentor Dr. Phil Birge-Liberman on a project titled:  Examining The Perceived Nutritional Environment in the North End of Hartford.

The SURF program is jointly sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Research, the Provost’s Office, the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Honors Program, donors to the university, and the Deans of the Schools and Colleges.

InCHIP Scholars Lead Conversations at Moving Beyond Implications: Research into Policy Conference

January 7, 2025

Peter Chen, a UConn associate professor in the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies, and his collaborator Rachel Smith Hale, assistant director of Research on Resilient Cities, Racism, and Equity (RRCRE) at UConn Hartford, demonstrated how web GIS can be used to communicate project outcomes and community services through two case studies that leveraged GIS at the the 2nd annual Moving Beyond Implications: Research into Policy conference on December 12, 2024. 

Hale spoke about the Love Your Block Story Map, which documented a city-wide effort to provide mini grants to support urban beautification and renewal projects in Hartford. Chen discussed how the Windham Life project enhanced information sharing about food pantries, meal programs, transportation resources, and other food resources for Windham County residents.

“Not only are GIS maps a fantastic tool for evaluation and analysis for policymakers and planners, but they are also intuitive tools for communicating with the public,” said Hale. “We suggest collaborating with universities to leverage GIS in identifying patterns within socioeconomic, infrastructure, and environmental data, and providing funding to GIS-based community projects.”

Continue reading on UConn Today.

GSCU Students Attend Top International Climate Conference: A Once-In-A-Lifetime Experience

December 20, 2024

14 UConn students, and five faculty and staff, attended the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP 29) in Baku, Azerbaijan in November, 2024. 

The students who attended are from a variety of disciplines, including marketing and urban and community studies, geographic information science, accounting, philosophy, and social responsibility and impact in business.

Learn more about this experience on UConn Today.

Seeking Climate JUSTICE for All

November 14, 2024

Anji Seth has always been intrigued by collaborative research across disciplines. With her Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences, she specifically chose to teach in the department of geography, sustainability, community, and urban studies (where she is now the interim department head) because of how it positioned her to pursue interdisciplinary climate change research.  

“Many social scientists and humanities researchers have been working on these issues for decades,” Seth says. It has become increasingly apparent to her that the solutions to climate change – and the devastating ripple effects across vulnerable communities – could be unlocked through strategic collaboration among diverse researchers.  

Seth and colleagues formed JUSTICE, or the Collaboratory for JUST Innovation and Climate Equity. What started out as an informal faculty reading group, reading and discussing thought-provoking books on climate change and humanity, soon blossomed into a fully fledged collaboration – researchers working together to tackle bigger projects than they could individually. 

The group includes physical scientists, like Seth, as well as faculty in the social sciences and humanities. In addition to Seth, the Collaboratory includes: 

  • Carol Atkinson-Palombo, Professor, Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies 
  • Oksan Bayulgen, Professor & Department Head, Political Science 
  • Thomas Bontly, Associate Professor, Philosophy; Director, Environmental Studies 
  • Syma Ebbin, Professor-in-Residence, Connecticut Sea Grant, Agricultural and Resource Economics and Maritime Studies Program 
  • Phoebe Godfrey, Professor-in-Residence, Sociology 
  • Mark Healy, Associate Professor and Department Head, History 
  • Kathleen Segerson, BOT Distinguished Professor, Economics 
  • Eleanor Ouimet, Assistant Professor, Anthropology 

This kind of disciplinary mixing is rare in academic spaces. And that’s precisely the problem, these scholars argue. 

This team of UConn researchers are changing climate conversations for good. Learn more on UConn Today.

UConn GSCU Wins Regional GeoBowl at Fall NESTVAL Conference

October 28, 2024

Congratulations to the UConn GeoBowl Team! With the help of GeoBowl advisor, Dr. Nat Trumbull, Hunter Jacobson and Jack Dennison emerged as champions at the 2024 NESTVAL meeting.  The regional AAG meeting took place October 25 & 26 at Westfield State University.

Twenty-Nine New Faculty Join CLAS

August 26, 2024

Twenty-nine new faculty members joined CLAS for the fall 2024 semester, and three of them are joining the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies.

Alexandra Lamiña joins the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies as an assistant professor. Lamiña, a Kitu-Kara Native woman from Nayón, Ecuador, received her doctoral degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked on geographical assessments on the politics of territorial rights and autonomy of people of Indigenous and Afro-Latin descent in Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil.  Her research primarily focuses on Amazonian urban geographies, learning from Indigenous epistemological traditions and drawing on feminist, Indigenous, and decolonizing perspectives in geography and urban planning.

Julissa Rojas-Sandoval joins the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies and The Institute of the Environment as an assistant professor. Rojas-Sandoval received her doctoral degree from the University of Puerto Rico. She also worked as a postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution/National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Her research interests focus on plant ecology and tropical forests, specifically around the context of biological invasions, biodiversity conservation, and human-caused environmental changes, using approaches that span population dynamics, machine learning, data-driven simulations, theoretical modeling, biogeography, and community ecology.

Hanlin Zhou joins the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies as a tenure-track assistant professor. He earned his doctoral degree in geography from the University of Toronto. His academic interests lie at the dynamic intersection of artificial intelligence with geospatial data and technology, focusing on understanding human activities such as mobility, health behaviors, crime prevention, and natural and human-induced environmental risk.

Learn more about the nearly 30 new faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on UConn Today.

GSCU Student Sydney Clements Named Switzer Fellow For Environmental Studies

July 16, 2024

Sydney Clements ’16 (CLAS), a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies, was named a Fellow of the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation for applied science, academic research, policy, and environmental activism. 

Clements’ research is focused on the intersection of food access, farmer viability, and environmental sustainability. She is currently studying best practices for network food hubs to build a more sustainable and fair local food system in Connecticut.  

The Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation is a national network that identifies and nurtures environmental leaders to create positive environmental change. This year, Clements is one of 24 Switzer Fellows to join the network of over 750 environmental leaders across the United States.  

Story reposted from UConn Today