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.
UConn and Fort Hays State University competed in Werth Innovation for Sustainability Challenge. Two teams of students, one from UConn and one from Fort Hays State University, pitched their sustainability-focused start-up business plans to address food waste in the second Werth Innovation for Sustainability Challenge held on Nov. 2 at UConn.
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.
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.”
Congratulations to Jake Layburn for successfully defending his thesis, which is titled: Health Geographic Perspective on Mpox Outbreak in the United States.
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.
Congratulations to Yunhe Cui for successfully defending her dissertation, which is titled: Bike-sharing: Towards Equitable Urban Transportation.
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.
Urban and Community Studies is now part of a new Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies.
Over the last three years, our program, the Department of Geography, and the Environmental Studies Program have had very productive talks about bringing our programs together under one roof. The time seemed right to bring these programs together in ways that will strengthen all three.
As we wrote in our proposal to the UConn Board of Trustees that was approved last week, the new department will conduct “community-engaged research and teaching on the urgent environmental, social, and geographical challenges and opportunities faced by communities around the globe in the twenty-first century. Our world class faculty address questions related to sustainability, resilience, health, and social inequities from local to global scales under the converging impacts of rapid climate change and increasing global urbanization,” and that the new department will be “deeply committed to cultivating an inclusive environment for our diverse community of faculty, staff, and students. As part of this commitment, our vision and initiatives are centered around values of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion…to identify pressing environmental and social justice issues facing societies today.”
The creation of this new department will not alter the degree plan you are currently following in our program. Your degree requirements are governed by the catalog year in which you declared the major or minor.
The name of the program will change on July 1st, but the majors and minors we support will continue to be offered as you move toward graduation.
Over the next 2-3 years the faculty and staff of the new department will work to create new course offerings, perhaps also new or revised majors, minors, and graduate programs, but these changes won’t happen immediately. For now, I just wanted to share this good news and what it shows about UConn’s commitment to our program.
Please let me know if you have questions about these changes. I can be reached by email at ken.foote@uconn.edu
Ken Foote, Director
Urban and Community Studies Program
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.