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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Professor Debs Ghosh is giving a colloquium to the Geosciences Department at Auburn University on Jan 15.
The title of her talk is “Making Structural Racism and Discrimination Measurable: A Community-Informed, Place-Based Index”.
Assistant Professor-in-Residence Dan Wanyama and a group of his closest friends and colleagues have collaborated to share their expertise with sustainability and conservation scholars and specialists in Africa. They developed a free advanced Geographic Information System (GIS) training program that is attracting interest from around the globe.
The full story can be found here: today.uconn.edu/2025/09/snapshot-a-unique-collaboration-helps-boost-conservation-with-gis-training
Congratulations to Stacy Maddern for his project on building a community garden in the Newhallville neighborhood of New Haven. Below are links for news stories about the work Professor Maddern has been doing in New Haven:
https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/newhallville_garden
https://www.newhavenarts.org/arts-paper/articles/a-dream-takes-root-on-shelton-avenue
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.
Peter Chen, a UConn associate professor in the Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies, and his collaborator Rachel Smith Hale, assistant director of Research on Resilient Cities, Racism, and Equity (RRCRE) at UConn Hartford, demonstrated how web GIS can be used to communicate project outcomes and community services through two case studies that leveraged GIS at the the 2nd annual Moving Beyond Implications: Research into Policy conference on December 12, 2024.
Hale spoke about the Love Your Block Story Map, which documented a city-wide effort to provide mini grants to support urban beautification and renewal projects in Hartford. Chen discussed how the Windham Life project enhanced information sharing about food pantries, meal programs, transportation resources, and other food resources for Windham County residents.
“Not only are GIS maps a fantastic tool for evaluation and analysis for policymakers and planners, but they are also intuitive tools for communicating with the public,” said Hale. “We suggest collaborating with universities to leverage GIS in identifying patterns within socioeconomic, infrastructure, and environmental data, and providing funding to GIS-based community projects.”
14 UConn students, and five faculty and staff, attended the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP 29) in Baku, Azerbaijan in November, 2024.
The students who attended are from a variety of disciplines, including marketing and urban and community studies, geographic information science, accounting, philosophy, and social responsibility and impact in business.
Anji Seth has always been intrigued by collaborative research across disciplines. With her Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences, she specifically chose to teach in the department of geography, sustainability, community, and urban studies (where she is now the interim department head) because of how it positioned her to pursue interdisciplinary climate change research.
“Many social scientists and humanities researchers have been working on these issues for decades,” Seth says. It has become increasingly apparent to her that the solutions to climate change – and the devastating ripple effects across vulnerable communities – could be unlocked through strategic collaboration among diverse researchers.
Seth and colleagues formed JUSTICE, or the Collaboratory for JUST Innovation and Climate Equity. What started out as an informal faculty reading group, reading and discussing thought-provoking books on climate change and humanity, soon blossomed into a fully fledged collaboration – researchers working together to tackle bigger projects than they could individually.
The group includes physical scientists, like Seth, as well as faculty in the social sciences and humanities. In addition to Seth, the Collaboratory includes:
This kind of disciplinary mixing is rare in academic spaces. And that’s precisely the problem, these scholars argue.
This team of UConn researchers are changing climate conversations for good. Learn more on UConn Today.
