The Graduate School has developed the Network for Enriched Mentorship (NEM) program to provide individualized mentorship for graduate students. GSCU faculty member Dr. Peter Chen is now directing the program. The story is featured on UConn Today.
Thanks to the GSCU graduate student Elaina Hancock for writing the story.
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.
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).
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.
The new unit will address interdisciplinary issues in the areas of sustainability, resilience, health, and social inequities.
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.
It will also strengthen the cross-college Environmental Studies program by giving it an administrative home in which to center its advisory board, with membership of faculty across CLAS and the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, the department leaders wrote in their proposal to the Board.
By conducting community-engaged research and teaching on the urgent environmental, social, and geographical challenges faced by communities around the globe, the GSCU department plans to address questions related to sustainability, resilience, health, and social inequities.
These questions will be addressed from local to global scales under the impacts of climate change and global urbanization, the department’s leaders say.
“The new department enables problem-focused education and research, crossing boundaries between traditional disciplines,” explains Anji Seth, department head and professor of geography. “For example, problems of urban environmental justice can be addressed by students and researchers through community engagement and with geospatial data analysis tools.”
Over time, the new department will increase its current contributions to the State by training students for jobs at Connecticut government agencies, municipal planning agencies, local businesses, and non-profit organizations.
The GSCU department serves approximately 200 undergraduate student majors, 100 minors, and 25 graduate students. Geography’s online and entrepreneurial graduate programs in Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) and Master’s in Energy and Environmental Management also serve 100 students and professionals in Connecticut and across the country.
The department will officially form as an administrative unit on July 1, 2024.
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