It is our pleasure to announce that Dr. Sandy Wong and Dr. Sen Wang are recipients of the 2024-2025 L.A. Brown Faculty Fellowship. Sandy and Sen will each be receiving $10,000 towards their research. Congratulations, Sandy and Sen!

Larry Brown—as many of you know—was a former chair of the department, a distinguished university professor, a Guggenheim fellow, former AAG president, and a pioneer in terms of the spatial quantitative revolution at Ohio State. Larry passed in April 2014—at work. That was his style; he was 100% committed to the department. You can read more about Larry at https://u.osu.edu/larryslegacy/2014/12/08/hello-world/ and https://u.osu.edu/larryslegacy/professional-bio/

Larry gave a very generous endowment to the department many years ago, while he was still chair, to provide funding for junior career, tenure- track professors. We disburse that endowment via the L.A. Brown Faculty Fellowship.

With support from the L.A. Brown Faculty Fellowship, Dr. Wong seeks to extend her ongoing work in environmental ableism to better understand the perceptions and lived experiences of people with disabilities as they navigate extreme weather and environmental hazards. The Brown Fellowship will fund a survey to collect responses from a representative sample of disabled individuals in the U.S. The survey will ask questions related to people's disability, socioeconomic background, geographic location, and perceptions and experiences related to recent encounters with extreme heat and flooding.

Dr. Wang will use the Brown funding to conduct a study focusing on human mobility patterns to understand the dynamics of people’s travel and commute behavior over time. Dr. Wang will integrate high-resolution locational data with spatiotemporal modeling techniques to identify key patterns and trends. This research aims to contribute to optimizing transportation planning and supporting the development of advanced air mobility systems.

Thank you, Larry, for your ongoing support for the department and our colleagues. We miss you!