Another very nice mixture of news and updates this week.

Watch out for excellent reports by Liz Alcalde, Communications Specialist ASC, on two of our students: Mary Grace Thibault and Ariel Cohen. These reports will appear in a piece Liz is doing for a feature on climate change. We will not upstage Liz's excellent report here, just to say that we are really proud of our students' commitment and accomplishments. We will post the reports as soon as they are published.

With a short week following the 4th of July it has been relatively quiet in the department. Nevertheless, we know from all the travel orders that our folks are out and about and conducting interesting summer research.

Minkyung Koh visited Korea and continued her research there, including field work. Minkyung received two awards to support her work: the Global Gateway Graduate Student Research Abroad grant and the Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Research grant. Minkyung’s advisor is Ed Malecki.

Ashley Toenjes is getting set to go on a research trip to conduct interviews in Minnesota. Ashley received a Critical Difference for Women Professional Development award to support this work. Ashley’s advisor is Nancy Ettlinger. We look forward to hearing the results of these projects in the future.

The Editors of GeoHumanities have selected Joel Wainwright's recent paper, “Race, Space, and the Problem of Guatemala in Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Early Work” (coauthored with literary critic Joshua Lund), to be the spotlight article of the 2016:2 issue. It is available here.

Hyeyoung Kim passed her Ph.D. dissertation defense this past Wednesday. The title of Hyeyoung’s dissertation is “The Role of Pastoralist Mobility in Foot-and-Mouth Disease Transmission in The Far North Region of Cameroon.” Her dissertation committee includes Rebecca Garabed (Veterinary Preventive Medicine), Mark Moritz (Anthropology), Dan Sui, Maurice Eastridge (Animal Science, graduate school representative), and Ningchuan Xiao (advisor).  Well done, Hyeyoung!

Also this week, Shaun Fontanella defended his PhD research in Derby 1186. Shaun’s dissertation is titled: "Ground Truthing the Socio-Technical Model of Energy Transitions at Building Scale Using an Energy Information System." We expect to hear more on this interesting project in the weeks to come. Shaun's advisor is Ola Ahlqvist; Ed Malecki and Ningchaun Xiao served on the committee. The graduate faculty representative was Richard Steckel (Department of Economics). Well done Shaun!

Here is an update on our recent graduate: Jill Clark (PhD, 2009) worked with Darla Munroe and wrote a dissertation entitled: "The repositioning of farming in newly restructured, consumptive spaces: the relational geography of US peri-urban agriculture." As many of you know, Jill is now an Assistant Professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at OSU, and also an affiliated faculty member in our department. According to the Glenn web site her work is "directed toward the management of food systems by state and local governments and community groups. In particular, she focuses on food-affiliated policies related to the entire system, including regulations, planning, expenditures, growing, processing, distribution, consuming and recycling." She has successfully generated external funding for her work and has published in specialized journals on topics such as food access.

Finally this week, Hui Kong and Dan Sui and have just published an Article in Environment and Planning B: “Integrating the normative with the positive dimension of the new science for cities: A geodesign-based framework for Cellular Automata modeling.” Always great to see graduate students and faculty publishing in good journals.