Ohio State nav bar

Chairman O'Kelly's News Brief

June 24, 2016

Chairman O'Kelly's News Brief

Ganesha

Lot's of news this week:

As of July 1 Kendra McSweeney is the incoming President of the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers (CLAG). It is independent from the AAG, and has about 300 members. The term is two years and it is an elected position. CLAG has played a significant role in funding field research by our students: Nora Sylvander and Zoe Pearson are the most recent recipients; Chris Hartmann has published in the CLAG journal, JLAG.

Calvin Tribby had another paper from his dissertation accepted for publication this week. The paper is by: Calvin P. Tribby, Harvey J. Miller, Barbara B. Brown, Carol M. Werner, and Ken R. Smith, “Analyzing walking route choice through built environments using random forests and discrete choice techniques,” in press at Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design.

I am pleased to let you know that Darla Munroe has been elected to serve on the ASC Faculty Advisory Council for a three year term. She joins 7 other members of ASC with three of these from SBS: Doug Downey (Sociology), Alex Thompson (Political Science) and Trisha Van Zandt (Psychology). Thanks for this valuable service!

All is going well with the arrival of our new colleague Steven Quiring. The Graduate Studies Committee has done a great job facilitating the transfer of a number of his students. Special thanks to Becky Mansfield and Caitlin Naber. Steven will have his office in Derby 1124.

We were very pleased to host a small round table meeting with several students this week: Rachel Mauk, John Banghoff, Nat Henry and Lucas Scarasso all helped with great ideas for future development of a strengthened program focusing on innovation. Thanks also to Ed Malecki, Harvey Miller, Kendra McSweeney and Diane Carducci for facilitating this meeting.

Bryan Mark has had a very busy period (as discussed in more detail next week). For now, note that Bryan and Mike Durand hosted the 73rd Annual Eastern Snow Conference Meeting last week (14-16 June). They were assisted by staff and students at BPCRC. Sessions were held at BPCRC and in the Wexner Auditorium. Ellen and Lonnie Thompson were both present, and Lonnie gave the banquet presentation at the Faculty Club. OSU Geography & BPCRC were well represented, with no less than 4 recent alumni presenting (full titles can be seen on the program listed on the website):  [1] Kyung In Huh (PhD 2014, now Assistant Professor at CalPoly Pomona) gave an invited talk showing updates to her dissertation on high resolution Andean glacier volume changes and hydrological modeling; [2] Aaron Wilson (BS 2002; MS 2010; PhD 2013) gave an invited talk on improvements to the Arctic System Reanalysis; [3] Nathan Amador (BA 2006; MS 2009) presented a talk on supraglacial melt lake depth retrieval methods; and [4] Ryan Crumley (MA 2015, now PhD student at the 'other OSU' Oregon State) shared a poster showing innovative snow cover mapping using Google Earth Engine.

Oliver Wigmore sent along a couple of links to some recent interviews he gave on his research. Both came out as hardcopy in the June magazine editions.
They are UAV/Remote sensing industry magazines.

AUVSI Unmanned Systems Magazine

And Tech Briefs

Nice job Ollie!

Finally this week, we wish Ed Malecki a good trip as he represents OSU at a conference on entrepreneurship in London. The event is co-organized by Ben Spigel (MA 2008) who many will remember from his days as a graduate student here. Ben is now Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Business School specializing in the geography of innovative entrepreneurship. Check his CV here.