Congratulations go out to Professor Ken Foote for receiving the George J Miller Award for Distinguished Service to Geographic Education from the National Council for Geographic Education. This is the Council’s highest award, recognizing distinguished service in geographic education.
Dr. Foote will receive the award at the NCGE Annual Conference next month (October 2026) in Richmond, VA.
Peter Chen has been invited to serve on the Editorial Board of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), the flagship journal in the field of geography.
As an Editorial Board member, Peter will serve a three-year term, providing critical service to the geography community by helping guide the journal’s editorial direction, supporting the peer-review process, and fostering excellence in geographic scholarship.
| Congratulations go out to Ludwig Chen, Youshuang Hu, and Ailing Jin who each received a 2026 AAG International Geographic Funds Award.
The IGIF funds are designed to support university student career development in the academic areas of applied spatial analysis or geographic information science or systems (SA/GISS).
Awardees will be celebrated during the upcoming AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco as a part of the AAG Awards Ceremony, which they are encouraged to attend.
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Congratulations to Julissa Rojas-Sandoval for being named a 2026 Ecological Society of America (ESA) Excellence in Ecology Scholar. This prestigious scholarship program celebrates and supports outstanding early- to mid-career Ph.D. ecologists from groups traditionally underrepresented in the scientific community.
More information can be found here: https://esa.org/blog/2026/01/21/ecological-society-of-america-selects-2026-eee-scholars
Google Street View images are digital snapshots of real streets, widely used for navigation and urban planning. Congcong Miao, a PhD student in GSCU, recently published a study in Journal of Transport Geography analyzing how people’s perceptions of street design affect transport safety. The study suggests emotional reactions to streetscapes can lead to non-motorist crashes and could help cities predict danger zones and design safer roads.
The study has been covered by several media outlets, including State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI) and Streetsblog USA.
Congratulations to Professor Debs Ghosh for receiving the InCHIP Excellence Award for Research on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities and Health Outcomes of Racism.
The Graduate School has developed the Network for Enriched Mentorship (NEM) program to provide individualized mentorship for graduate students. GSCU faculty member Dr. Peter Chen is directing the program.
Read the full story on UConn Today.
Thanks to the GSCU graduate student Elaina Hancock for writing the story.
Twenty-nine new faculty members joined CLAS for the fall 2024 semester, and three of them are joining the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies.
Alexandra Lamiña joins the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies as an assistant professor. Lamiña, a Kitu-Kara Native woman from Nayón, Ecuador, received her doctoral degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked on geographical assessments on the politics of territorial rights and autonomy of people of Indigenous and Afro-Latin descent in Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil. Her research primarily focuses on Amazonian urban geographies, learning from Indigenous epistemological traditions and drawing on feminist, Indigenous, and decolonizing perspectives in geography and urban planning.
Julissa Rojas-Sandoval joins the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies and The Institute of the Environment as an assistant professor. Rojas-Sandoval received her doctoral degree from the University of Puerto Rico. She also worked as a postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution/National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Her research interests focus on plant ecology and tropical forests, specifically around the context of biological invasions, biodiversity conservation, and human-caused environmental changes, using approaches that span population dynamics, machine learning, data-driven simulations, theoretical modeling, biogeography, and community ecology.
Hanlin Zhou joins the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies as a tenure-track assistant professor. He earned his doctoral degree in geography from the University of Toronto. His academic interests lie at the dynamic intersection of artificial intelligence with geospatial data and technology, focusing on understanding human activities such as mobility, health behaviors, crime prevention, and natural and human-induced environmental risk.
Learn more about the nearly 30 new faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on UConn Today.
Congratulations to Weixuan Lyu, a Ph.D. candidate in Geography, for winning the Peter Gould Award from the Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group (HMGSG) at the 2024 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting. This highly competitive award is meant to promote written scholarship by students across the health and medical geography field. Weixuan’s awarded paper is entitled: Beyond Spatial Proximity: Conceptualizing the Perceived Food Activity Space.
Weixuan has also been awarded the Student Travel Award from AAG Environmental Perception and Behavior Geography (EPBG).
The UConn Board of Trustees voted at its meeting on Feb. 29 to establish a new department merging the Department of Geography with Urban and Community Studies and providing an administrative home for Environmental Studies.
The new Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community and Urban Studies (GSCU) will draw on existing research and teaching strengths to address interdisciplinary issues in geography, environment, and sustainability.
The other new department is the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry, which will join four units: American Studies Program, Asian and Asian American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.
Both new departments will be effective as of July 1, and they are set to launch at the beginning of the fall semester.
