IMAGE OF THE WEEK
One of several renovation projects happening in Walker Building this summer and fall. Here, room 229 is being transformed into The C. Gregory Knight Collaborative Learning Lab.
GOOD NEWS
David G. Lautenschleger (’14g) has been recently hired as a full-time assistant professor at the University of Akron in the College of Applied Science and Technology. He will be teaching Surveying and GIS courses.
Azia Ranjbar is a co-author along with Gines, K., O’Brian, E., Ewara, E., Paris, W. (forthcoming).of Teaching Philosophical “Special” Topics: Black Feminism and Intersectionality. In O. Perlow (Ed.) Black Women’s Pedagogy and Praxes.
Yanan Xin earned travel rewards for CyberGIS’16 conference and presented poster for research project “using volunteered geographic information to estimate people’s accumulated radiation exposure.”
Send your good news to geography@psu.edu to be announced during Coffee Hour and published here.
NEWS
Department Newsletter PublishedThe Summer 2016 Department of Geography annual newsletter, GEOGRAPH, has been mailed and is now available online.
From the Department Head: Poised for success
We are getting a jump on the university-level revamp of general education requirements and Penn State’s new emphasis on engaged scholarship: out-of-class experiences that complement in-class learning, such as undergraduate research, internships, study abroad, service learning and community-based learning. Our UROC program that pairs undergrads with grad thesis research work (Geog 494) is a successful aspect of research engagement for geography majors. We are also poised to offer some of the first gen eds categorized as meeting the new Integrative Studies (IS) requirement. All Penn State general education courses will be re-certified this year, and we are ready. Brent Yarnal, whose retirement is celebrated in this issue, was a leader in both these initiatives at the university level as past Senate chair.
Mapping refugees through online engaged scholarship
This summer, Penn State Department of Geography online geospatial education program instructors Beth King and Fritz Kessler took ten students in the online Master of Geographic Information Systems (MGIS) program on a unique travel experience. In the new course, GEOG 597G: Challenges in Global Geosptial Analytics, Penn State students collaborated with graduate students from ITC – University of Twente located in Enschede, Netherlands to develop solutions to analyze spatio-temporal patterns in refugee migration data.
RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED
Measuring Spatial Accessibility to Urban Facilities and Services in Tehran
By Rabiei-Dastjerdi, H., Matthews, S. A. & Ardalan, A.
In Spatial Demography (2016).
doi:10.1007/s40980-016-0028-2
Impact assessment of PM10 cement plants emissions on urban air quality using the SCIPUFF dispersion model
By Vincenzo Leone, Guido Cervone, Pasquale Iovino
In Environmental Monitoring and Assessment
doi: 10.1007/s10661-016-5519-5