Congratulations to Sabina Bhandari for successfully defending her dissertation, which is titled: Housing as a Structural Determinant of Health: Unpacking the Black Box between Historical Housing Policy and Present-Day Health through Long-Term Neighborhood Segregation and Disinvestment in Connecticut.
Congratulations to Yan Chen for successfully defending her dissertation, which is titled: Climatic Drivers of Gross Primary Productivity Variability: Insights from Observations and Earth System Models.
Congcong Miao (PhD ’26) and her research featured on the UConn Today website.
Check out the full article, titled UConn Ph.D. Uses High-Tech Tools to Help Urban Planners Make Cities Safer.
today.uconn.edu/2026/04/meet-the-graduate-congcong-miao-ph-d
Congratulations to Congcong Miao for successfully defending her dissertation, which is titled: Towards Explainable GeoAI: Modeling Spatial Patterns, Perceptions, and Dependencies in Urban Systems.
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
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”.
Congratulations to Daniel Kraemer for successfully defending his dissertation, which is titled: Context is Everything: Advancing Earthquake Social Vulnerability Models Through Identifying Local and Hazard-Specific Drivers
Dr. Julissa Rojas-Sandoval’s current research about using AI to predict biological invasions is the focus of a post on the UConn Today site. Read the full story here: today.uconn.edu/2025/10/a-new-ai-based-method-to-help-prevent-biological-invasions
Congratulations to Sydney Clements for successfully defending her dissertation, which is titled: Distributing Equity: An Analysis of Existing Food Hub Distribution Models in Connecticut.
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