Late last week we received news that Nora Sylvander (adviser Kendra McSweeney) passed her candidacy exam. Her committee consisted of Becky Mansfield, Kenneth Madsen, and Jeremy Brooks (SENR).

Between the semesters, over the break, the work of the department in preparing for the New Year will continue. We are set to file some talking points with the Provost on highlights of our program. Although each area of our department has many distinctive features, Urban, Regional and Global Studies and Environment and Society are core disciplinary topics; the physical and climatic areas give us a distinctive entrée to the STEM fields, and the GIS and Air Transport areas contribute in a very strong way to the head count of majors and our broad impact on educational grounds. Of these, notable graduate placements occur in all areas, the heaviest external funding is in the second, and the heaviest demand for our technical classes is in the third. Of course all areas make contributions across the board but this is one way to frame our activity. The challenge is to balance and resource our many successful programs. Comments welcome!

We also will have an early 2017 meeting to discuss our progress on this year’s budget. The good news here is that all is going well. We are also making serious progress on our faculty searches.

Work is progressing on new space – we will obtain Derby 0160 and 0100 in the basement and the plans for rehabbing both these spaces are well under way. Once that happens, we will be able to make progress on the bigger remodel of the collaborative work space for undergraduates supported by Gary Sharpe.

Not much other news this week in view of the busy time for everyone. I hope that everyone has come through the end of semester and that the exams and grades are well under control.