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.
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.
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.
June 19, 2024
Congratulations to Aaron Adams for successfully defending his dissertation, which is titled: Spatial Perspectives on COVID-19: Lessons for Future Pandemic Preparedness.
May 23, 2024
UConn hosted a collaborative platform that brought together scholars, students, and experts from various disciplines. The Just Transitions Symposium aimed to explore themes and strategies for a sustainable and equitable global future, emphasizing the importance of diverse voices and disciplines in addressing climate change.
The idea for the Just Transitions Symposium stemmed from a faculty reading group that explores just transition themes, many of which have their roots in the social sciences and humanities, explained Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Chair of Atmospheric Sciences Group Anji Seth.
Professor of Geography Carol Atkinson-Palombo drew a parallel between the symposium and this year’s UConn Reads selection, Braiding the Sweet Grass by Robin Wall Kimmerer:
“Thinking on how Wall-Kimmerer frames it, we don’t know what will spark the change, but we need to gather the materials and momentum to fuel the transformation. That is consistent with our role as educators, we are gathering this information to set the stage to think about this transition seriously.”
April 20, 2024
Congratulations to Weixuan Lyu, a Ph.D. candidate in Geography, for winning the Peter Gould Award from the Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group (HMGSG) at the 2024 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting. This highly competitive award is meant to promote written scholarship by students across the health and medical geography field. Weixuan’s awarded paper is entitled: Beyond Spatial Proximity: Conceptualizing the Perceived Food Activity Space.
Weixuan has also been awarded the Student Travel Award from AAG Environmental Perception and Behavior Geography (EPBG).
April 10, 2024
Congratulations to Jake Layburn for successfully defending his thesis, which is titled: Health Geographic Perspective on Mpox Outbreak in the United States.
April 3, 2024
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.
March 25, 2024
Congratulations to Yunhe Cui for successfully defending her dissertation, which is titled: Bike-sharing: Towards Equitable Urban Transportation.
March 21, 2024
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.