Here is an update on our recent graduate: Nurcan Atalan Helicke is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at Skidmore. She received her Ph.D. here in 2010 with her advisor Becky Mansfield. At Skidmore, she teaches several courses related to her specialization and training: including Environmental Concerns in Perspective, Political Ecology, The Politics of Food, Global Environmental Governance, and Environment and Development in the Middle East. Her research interests are in conservation of agricultural biodiversity, pedagogies and sustainability, development, and food movements. We are proud of her successful career.

Here is an update on our recent graduate: Kejing Peng (MA 2013; now Software Engineer at Microsoft) has continued to develop an outstanding resource for visualization of air transport data. The site with the latest version is here.

This application takes advantage of open source technology. The geovisualization of aviation data is powered by open source GIS software: PostGIS, GeoServer and OpenLayers 2. To give a quick example, you can start at an airport (say CMH) find out where the traffic is going, what airlines are serving it and develop a time series. In addition Kejing has made innovative use of international data sets. Data for airports includes: the US, UK, Taiwan, Japan, China, Mexico, Australia, Switzerland and part of Thailand. An airport report page will show the annual/monthly flow (all commercial activities), and popular destinations of scheduled flights (when available from the data sources).   This is a superb technical accomplishment!