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Chairman O'Kelly's News Brief

October 28, 2016

Chairman O'Kelly's News Brief

Morton O'Kelly

A very nice view this week of the international research and outreach by our colleagues.

Kenneth Madsen (Associate Professor, Newark), presented a talk at McMaster University recently at a workshop on "Dis/placing the Borders of North America."  Kenneth is currently enjoying his sabbatical in Arizona, where he is continuing his research on the Tohono O’odham reservation among other topics.

Joint work by Tamar Forrest (PhD, 2006; adviser Ed Malecki) and the late Larry Brown was featured and discussed in a recent issue of a newsletter called Priceonomics entitled "The United States of Refugees."
Tammy's dissertation dealt with pathways for African refugees in the US and the newsletter reports on her continuing work on Somali migrants to Columbus.

Joel Wainwright continues his active research and involvement with the people of Belize and he already has trips planned for November and December. The work is funded by the National Geographic Society. Joel tells us that additional colleagues [Desheng Liu and Shiguo Jiang (PhD, 2012; adviser Desheng Liu)] will be involved in this area of specialization. Keep up the great work!

Work by Alvaro Montenegro that posted on The Conversation is starting to rack up the views! As some may know, this is a new OSU outlet for helping with the popular dissemination of new  research findings.

Max Woodworth visited Ohio University this week to give an invited colloquium talk to East Asian Studies and the Wealth and Poverty group there. The talk is titled "Ghosts in the Shell Game: Informal Finance and Urban Imaginaries in China's Western Mining Frontier."

Jim DeGrand has succeeded in making the data being generated in the Geography 5922 Microclimate Measurements class available on the web.
There are several tabs on this page which correspond to experiments and exercises in the course: basic meteorological measurement, measurement of the radiation budget, etc. More tabs will appear as the semester goes along. This is definitely a work in progress and mostly for use by the students but it might be interesting to others as well. This was made possible by purchase of the 2 cell modems and cell data packages. Observations from our weather station on the roof of Denny Hall can be found here. Great work -- very creative!

In more good news, Jialin Lin tells me that his former Master’s Student Erik Fraza got his Ph.D. degree from Florida State University this summer, and became an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Geosciences, Mississippi State University.

Well done to all!

Finally in local committee news:

During a recent visit back to Columbus Dan Sui organized a research committee meeting for his advisee Hui Kong. Attending were Max Woodworth, Ningchuan Xiao and Morton O'Kelly.
We have also been able to arrange a graduate committee consultation for Jake Carr's committee [Ningchuan Xiao, Ed Malecki, Kate Calder and Morton O'Kelly (adviser)].
This practice, highly recommended by the graduate studies committee is a very valuable experience for all concerned.