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News Brief from our Chair Darla Munroe

April 17, 2020

News Brief from our Chair Darla Munroe

News Brief 041720

Are you bored with your Zoom background? Download one of the Ohio State backgrounds for Zoom, like this one of the Oval.

Faculty News: 

Bridget Freisthler, associate dean of research in the College of Social Work, and Elisabeth Root, associate professor in the Department of Geography, have received COVID-19 Seed Funding from the Office of Research. Their project will explore the COVID-19 crisis in the context of stress, social support concerns and any geographic factors associated with punitive parenting practices, including physical punishment.

Student News:  

Laurel Bayless, (Geog BA student, Becky Mansfield advisor) has a presentation in the 2020 Spring Undergraduate Research Festival. Entitled “Ideas about Nature and Society in Writing About Human Evolution,” she examines variation in ideas about Neanderthals’ humanity. Because this year’s research festival was moved online, the recorded PowerPoint presentation is available for viewing here.

Jake Ferrell defended his BA Honors thesis with colors flying. Committee: Joel Wainwright (chair), Kareem Usher, and Bart Elmore.

Xiaoyu Liang successfully defended her Master’s thesis earlier this month. Her thesis is titled “Quantile Regression-based Change Detection using Landsat Analysis Ready Data.”  The members of Xiaoyu’s committee consisted of Steven Quiring, Yoonkyung Lee (Statistics), and Desheng Liu (Advisor).

Alumni News:  

Mike Bettes (meteorologist for the Weather Channel) "dropped in" via Zoom to give a guest lecture in our class GEOG 3900: Global Climate Change: Causes and Consequences (taught by Bryan Mark and Emilio Mateo).

Upcoming Events:  

The Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA) is having an upcoming panel discussion: "The 2020 Census and COVID-19: Implications for Communities." Friday, May 8th, noon - 1pm.

Geography Blog:  

In this week's Geography blog, ASP PhD Candidate Chengfei He discusses the difficulties in modeling changes in the Asian monsoon, whose dynamics largely shape the freshwater supply on which South and East Asian societies critically depend.

 

Darla Munroe
Professor and Chair