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

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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.

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

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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

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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.

Twenty-Nine New Faculty Join CLAS

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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.

Big News for Geography: CLAS adds Two New Departments

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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.

Learn more on UConn Today.

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New Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies Forms in CLAS

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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.  

This story is from UConn Today.