51ÁÔÆæ

Alumni Spotlight: Jonathan Hanes

Dr. Jonathan Hanes’ edited book published, .

In Biophysical Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing, the authors describe major applications of satellite remote sensing for studying Earth’s biophysical phenomena. The focus of the book lies on the broad palette of specific applications (metrics) of biophysical activity derived using satellite remote sensing. With in-depth discussions of satellite-derived biophysical metrics that focus specifically on theory, methodology, validation, major findings, and directions of future research, this book provides an excellent resource for remote sensing specialists, ecologists, geographers, biologists, climatologists, and environmental scientists.

Spring Letter From the Chair: Changshan Wu

Greetings from Bolton Hall, where we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of spring! Thanks to the long winter, many of us are looking forward to this year’s Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, which will take place in sunny Tampa. The department will be well represented at the conference – ten faculty and eleven graduate students will be participating – and we are pleased that once again we can support the travel of our students. Despite (or maybe because of) the long winter, we have been  keeping busy, and we are proud to share our congratulations to several faculty and students.

Associate Professor Rina Ghose has been unanimously recommended to be promoted to Full Professor by the Social Science Executive Committee. Also, we’re very pleased to announce that one of our graduate students, Margaret Pettygrove, has been awarded a 51ÁÔÆæ Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship for the 2014-2015 academic year, continuing our long string of success for this very competitive fellowship. In addition, we have just learned that Assistant Professor Anne Bonds and her collaborators have received a prestigious and highly competitive Transdisciplinary Challenge Grant from 51ÁÔÆæ’s Center for 21st Century Studies.

This semester we are honored to welcome two distinguished guest speakers in our long-running and highly successful Harold and Florence Mayer Lecture series. The first was Professor Audrey Kobayashi of Queen’s University, a former president of the Association of American Geographers and one of the discipline’s most prominent scholars of race and racism. At Professor Kobayashi’s lecture, we were privileged to have with us our own Distinguished Professor Emeritus Harold M. Rose, in whose honor the Association of American Geographers recently created an award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice. We are laying the groundwork for a new lecture series in honor of Distinguished Professor Rose, and we look forward to sharing news about this in upcoming newsletters.

We hope you enjoy this spring’s issue, which features more details on the announcements above, as well as news from our faculty, current students, and several of our recent alumni. We’d love to share even more stories from alumni in future issues, and we encourage you to send us your news and photos – you’ll find contact information to the right or submit them online at /letsci/geography/alumni/alumniform.cfm.

Professor Changshan Wu

51ÁÔÆæ Geographers Host Research Collaborators from University of Illinois

In December, faculty member Ryan Holifield and PhD student Katie Williams hosted researchers from the University of Illinois (Bethany Cutts and Andrew Greenlee) who recently began a study of community involvement in sediment removal projects from contaminated rivers.

Ryan Holifield and PhD student Katie Williams host researchers from the University of Illinois

Ryan Holifield and PhD student Katie Williams host researchers from the University of Illinois

They were joined by representatives from Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, UW-Extension, and Milwaukee County Parks. Landscape architect Kevin Haley led us on a rather chilly but highly informative tour of a recent restoration project at Milwaukee’s Lincoln Park. Ryan and Katie are collaborating with Caitie McCoy of Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant on research on stakeholder involvement at Great Lakes Areas of Concern.