Recent Awards to UO Geographers

Congratulations to Dr. Susan Hardwick (left), Dr. Xiaobo Su (middle) and PhD Candidate Easther Chigumira for their recent successes. Dr. Hardwick was the recipient of the 2013 George J. Miller Award for Distinguished Service in Geographic Education awarded by the NCGE. Dr. Su won the 2013 Asia Studies Fellowship at the East-West Center in Washington, D.C., a three-month fellowship where he will research the regional integration of China's anti-drug policies in northern Laos and Myanmar. Meanwhile, Easther received the 2013-2014 Margaret McNamara Memorial Fellowship awarded to women from developing countries to help improve education and livelihoods of women and children in developing countries. In addition, Easther won the 2013-2014 American Association of University Women International Fellowship.

Geographers run the distance

On April 28, 60% of the female UO Geography faculty ran the Eugene Half-Marathon. Go Ducks! Image above (from left to right): Katie Meehan, Puddles, Amy Lobben, Jessie Clark

Atlas of Yellowstone wins PROSE Award

The new Atlas of Yellowstone, by the Geography Department's Andrew Marcus, Jim Meacham, and Alethea Steingisser (with Ann Rodman), has received the PROSE award for Excellence in Physical Sciences and Mathematics from the American Publishers Association - one of the top five awards of the association.

• Story at Around the O.
• A tour-de-force of cartography Eugene-Springfield Register-Guard.
• "Editors' Pick" in the Association of College and Research Libraries’ December issue of Choice magazine. The magazine notes that “Given the national nature of Yellowstone and the outstanding quality of this atlas, all academic libraries should acquire it."
• Book web page atlasofyellowstone.com

Meehan takes geography students to “The Wire”

How many college classes require that students “be willing to watch four to six hours of television each week”? Welcome to Geography 442/542, where Katie Meehan uses the gritty “Wire” series to examine how capital and culture shape the American city.

See story at around.uoregon.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS - China and the Restructuring of International Political Economy

Conference sessions will take place from 14 to 15 April 2013 on the campus of the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. The conference will consist of keynote addresses, paper presentation, and general discussion.

Presentation proposals should be 250 words long. Please send your submission (plus a short biography) to xiaobo@uoregon.edu by 31 December 2012. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out in late-January, 2013. There is no registration fee for the conference. Limited funding will be made available to presenters. For additional information about the conference, click here, or please contact Xiaobo Su xiaobo@uoregon.edu.

Bartlein Receives Award for Excellence

We always knew Bart is excellent, but now it's official: congratulations to Bart (photo, far left), who is a 2012 recipient of the Fund for Faculty Excellence Award.The Fund for Faculty Excellence Awards provide one-time awards of $20,000 to tenured or tenure-related faculty who have distinguished themselves in research, teaching, and leadership. Recipients were honored Thursday, November 15th.

UO Geography grads sweep APCG awards

At this year's conference of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers (in Olympia, WA), UO Geography grads took nearly every major award available. Awardees include Innisfree McKinnon, Aquila Flower, Lindsay Naylor, Didi Martinez, Sarah Praskievicz, Emma Slager and Laurie Trautman. It's official: UO grads rule!

Congratulations to our 2012 PhD and MA/MS graduates!

We are proud that many of our grads have landed excellent jobs in geography-related fields, many in academic positions and others in government and industry.

Adam Lake, PhD, will be working for the state of Oregon mapping broad-band internet connectivity. Christine Rasmussen, PhD is working as a restoration consultant in Colorado. Leslie McLees, PhD, will be starting a tenure-track position in the Department of Geography and Planning, Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Ingrid Nelson, PhD, will be starting a tenure-track position at University of Vermont, Department of Geography, after a one-year post-doc position in Europe. Alex Ginsburg, MA, is preparing for a transition to medical school. Gretchen Hill, MA, will be teaching in the department over the summer. René Kladzyk, MA, continues to work in the Spatial and Map Cognition Research Lab. Jennifer Kusler, MS, will be continuing work in paleolimnology with the USGS in Menlo Park, CA. Heather McAfee, MA, will be returning to work for the Department of Defense. Amanda Reinholtz, MS, is exploring options as she completes her research over the summer. Derek Watkins, MA, will take up a paid internship with the graphics group at the New York Times.

Best wishes to the Class of 2012

Accolades are due to the winners of our department awards:

Trussell Family Scholarship is awarded to students based on academic merit and interest in a career serving humanity. Winners are:
• Amanda Draves for her paper Viable alternatives to the global food system
• Benjamin MacCormack-Gelles for his paper Food deserts in Portland: mapping the characteristics of food insecurity

The Holzman Family Award is aimed at an outstanding undergraduate student studying geography with a demonstrated commitment to learning and potential for further academic achievement. The winner is Lauren Tierney. Lauren focused on physical geography and GIS and will be attending graduate school in Atmospheric Sciences at University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The Bill Loy Award for Excellence in Cartographic Design and Geographic Visualization is given annually to a deserving graduate or undergraduate geography student at the University of Oregon.

• First place: Branden Rishel Fern Ridge Lake
• Honorable mention: Eric Stipe Simplifying streams: a generalization of the National Hydrography Dataset Plus
• Honorable mention: Molly MacDonald Canoeing with the Cree
• Special honorable mention for first digital map submission: Jakeb Prickett and Kyle Terry Breweries and brewpubs of Oregon

Graduate students bring in the grants and fellowships this spring

• Two NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants awarded from the Geography and Spatial Science Program!
• Aquila Flower: Interactions Between Forest Defoliator Outbreaks, Wildfires, Climate Variability and Nitrogen Availability in the Interior Pacific Northwest. Aquila also won a research grant from the Mazamas.
• Sarah Praskievicz: A Hierarchical Modeling Approach to Simulating the Geomorphic Response of River Systems to Climate Change. Sarah also won a research award from the Northwest Scientific Association.
• Dylan Brady received a year-long FLAS Fellowship to study advanced Chinese at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing.
• Erin Herring won first-place poster at the Northwest Scientific Association meeting in Boise, March 2012: Climate and Vegetation in a Putative Pleistocene Refugium in Northern Idaho Inferred from a 120,000-Year Sediment Record.
• Kenji Izumi won the best young scientist (grad students and post-docs) poster at the PMIP3 2nd General Meeting, Crewe Hall, Crewe, Cheshire, UK for his poster: Similarity of Large-Scale Climatic Gradients and Contrasts Under Paleo, Present and Future Forcing.
• Meche Lu won a UO Public Impact Fellowship. This is one of the UO's top graduate awards. Meche's award letter states that Meche's research "has the potential to make a truly significant impact on society." Meche also won a Global Oregon Summer Research Award, which will support her fieldwork in Peru this summer.
• Laurie Trautman won the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund Graduate Fellowship for International Research, a competitive award across the entire Oregon University system. Laurie has also won a summer research grant from the Center on Diversity and Community (CoDaC).

Professor Alec Murphy receives Herman Teaching Award

The Thomas F. Herman Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching honors senior faculty members who have achieved outstanding records as teachers. The Herman Award is presented to faculty members who have demonstrated long-standing excellence in teaching, and have contributed significantly to student learning at the undergraduate or graduate level. Way to go, Alec!