I am pleased to announce that Darla Munroe has accepted the position of Interim Chair of the Department of Geography for a one year term beginning July 1. Darla will be returning from Sweden shortly, where she has been working with Ola Ahlqvist on our summer study abroad class. Please join me in welcoming Darla to this leadership position.

I am planning my own relocation to University Hall starting in the coming week.

Research News

Stephen Shield successfully defended his thesis this week. His committee members were Elizabeth Root and Jay Hobgood, along with adviser Steven Quiring. Stephen will be starting his PhD in Atmospheric Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Fall. He will be around OSU until about Aug. 1. Thanks Stephen from the department, and we wish you all the best.

Dan Sui writes this week from Shenzhen.  He has been working with Hui Kong on the work using the smart card data from Shenzhen, and they plan to make the initial submission of a journal article based on this work this month before Hui officially starts her post-doc work in Singapore.
Dan is attending the "Mega urban agglomeration in the transformation era: theory, typologies and governance" Workshop organized by the City U of Hong Kong.  Later Dan is going to Shanghai to attend the 9th International Symposium on Spatially Integrated Social Sciences and Humanities, where he will be a keynote speaker on "Making spatially integrated social sciences more robust and reliable through convergence research."

Scarlett Jin is conducting field work and interviews in her study area - Anshan.  A co-authored paper has been accepted by the Professional Geographer:  "Uber, Public Transit, and Urban Transportation Equity: A Case Study in New York City" by Scarlett Jin, Hui Kong, and Dan Sui.

Morteza Karimzadeh is starting as a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, where he will be working on visual analytics systems for sustainable agriculture. We wish him all the best in this new role.

Please send me reminders on any items I may have overlooked these past few weeks, so that I can catch up in my final edition next Friday.