Chairman O'Kelly's News Brief

Continuing with the great work ASC is doing to highlight our faculty:
Elisabeth Root is featured in a discussion of Women in STEM. She researches and teaches at the intersection of geographic science and public health, and is an affiliate of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics program. Elisabeth explores geographic patterns of health and disease using quantitative spatial methodologies, with an emphasis on improving children’s health. She has been involved with several major international health projects, including in Bangladesh, Honduras, Philippines and Indonesia, and with two research initiatives in the United States.
Several members of the department attended the UCGIS annual meeting in DC this week, where Dan Sui delivered an opening keynote on "NSF's big ten ideas and the new frontiers of science: What's next for GIScience?" Also there were Harvey Miller, Shaun Fontanella, and Hal Moellering. Harv is the Program Co-chair (along with Kathleen Stewart) for the UCGIS 2017 annual meeting.
Here is a little more about this meeting: Shaun Fontanella (PhD 2016; with Ola Ahlqvist) was part of a team assembled at the UCGIS Summer School at U Illinois last week to develop and implement a research project using high performance cyberinfrastructure and geospatial data. His team was selected to present their project at the meeting in DC - a decision support system and dashboard to help farmers with cropping decisions based on weather, soil moisture and market prices.
Harvey organized and ran a panel at UCGIS on "Is GIScience up to the challenges of a smart and connected world?" Panelists included Bhudu Bhaduri (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Mark Dowd (White House Office of Management and Budget; US Department of Transportation), Kathleen Stewart (University of Maryland) and David Wollman (National Institute of Standards & Technology).
The department is in the midst of several room renovations. Work has progressed on Derby 0100 and 0160, as well as the research space for undergraduates. We are also renovating a few faculty and graduate student offices in preparation for the Fall.
I hope all is going well with the summer research season.