Lots of news and announcements this week.

We are pleased to welcome Nik Heynen as he presents the 2017 Taaffe Lecture to the department. Nik is Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia. Nik will deliver the 2017 Edward J. “Ned” Taaffe Colloquium on Friday, March 3, at 3:30 pm, in Derby Hall 1080. Reception to follow.

I am pleased to report that the latest publication from the Miller/Tribby team has just appeared in print.
Calvin P. Tribby, Harvey J. Miller, Barbara B. Brown, Ken R. Smith, Carol M. Werner,
Geographic regions for assessing built environmental correlates with walking trips: A comparison using different metrics and model designs.  Health & Place 45, May 2017, Pages 1–9.

Calvin Tribby has just won recognition from the AAG Transportation Geography Specialty Group for his dissertation. The award will be presented at the Boston meeting. Calvin completed his doctoral degree here in 2016 (Harvey Miller, adviser) and is now on a Post Doc at Fellowship at the National Cancer Institute.  As part of the fellowship, he will spend next year in residence at Columbia University in NYC earning a Masters’ in Public Health.

In some great news for Brooke Raake, she has been offered a position with the new Data Analytics major and is currently planning for the transition to that office. Brooke has made a tremendous difference to our undergraduate program. We are all very grateful for her great work and many contributions. She thoroughly deserves the opportunity that has opened up and the resulting options for advancement. Contingency planning for continuity in this vital aspect of our program is under way. Please join me in thanking Brooke for her many contributions to our department.

ResearchGate has begun to break into the public consciousness as a Facebook-style social network for academics. I was amazed to learn the scope of their reach: “Researchers now upload roughly 2.5 million papers to ResearchGate every month.”

Elisabeth Root has been awarded a grant from the Wexner Medical Center, Center for Clinical and Translational Science.  She will be building a GIS of the hospital, developing a dataset that catalogs attributes of rooms in the hospital, integrates this information with data from the electronic medical records system and attempts to model risk for hospital acquired infection.  Pretty exciting stuff!

Amy Kennedy, one of our new transfer students majoring in Urban, Regional, & Global Studies with a minor in GIS, received the Darrel Hess Community College Scholarship from the AAG. She will be presented with this award at the annual conference next month. This scholarship required that applicants be enrolled at a community college with a plan to transfer to a four-year school and major in Geography. Amy transferred to Ohio State from Sinclair Community College in Dayton at the beginning of SP17.

Finally, thanks to the Graduate Studies Committee, and Caitlin Naber for all the hard work recently.
Please participate in making the visiting graduates feel welcome as they visit the department today.