First this week some terrific news. I am very pleased to announce that Debangana Bose has been awarded a Presidential Fellowship from the Graduate School. This fellowship recognizes outstanding scholarship and research ability and provides recipients the opportunity to devote full time to their dissertation research. Debangana’s advisor is Nancy Ettlinger. Debangana has been a recipient of several other awards, including a successful DDRI proposal to NSF for her field research, an Environmental Policy Initiative summer research grant, and a Critical Difference for Women grant. She also took 1st prize at Hayes Graduate Student Research forum. Thanks to the graduate committee and Becky Mansfield for coordinating this successful case.
Debangana joins a list of other recent winners, well worth mentioning again are three winners as this really is such a selective award: Chris Hartmann (awarded 2015; Becky Mansfield advisor), Ollie Wigmore (awarded 2014; Bryan Mark advisor), and Zoe Pearson (awarded 2013; Kendra McSweeney advisor). All received their PhDs in 2016.

PhD student Jake Carr has accepted a position with Moody’s Analytics in San Francisco upon completion of his degree this summer. Jake is the recipient of a University Fellowship for the final year of his studies. Jake earned a Master’s in Applied Statistics on the way to a PhD here in Geography (Morton O’Kelly, advisor), and has capitalized on prior experience in risk assessment in competing for his new job. His title is Assistant Director of Research in the Enterprise Risk Solutions (ERS) department at their San Francisco headquarters. This is the first ever position with a specific Geospatial Analytics focus at Moody’s. It is also the first hire toward the development of a fully integrated quantitative spatial analytics unit within the ERS department.

Congratulations to Alex McCarthy on the successful defense of his master's thesis (Tuesday). His thesis is titled "Convective Cores in Continental and Oceanic Thunderstorms: Strength, Width and Dynamics." The committee was Jay Hobgood, Bryan Mark, and Jialin Lin (Advisor).

Nancy Ettlinger presented “Microwork Developments and Development Implications” at the London School of Economics in a workshop entitled “Infrastructures of Inclusion.”

Anurag Mazumdar had an article published in India’s The Wire back in March. It’s an excellent piece on Uber and Ola in India: you can read it here

Please do remember to send us interesting photos from the field or from your travels.