In preparation for a periodic review of our graduate program, the faculty and staff have
been assembling department scholarship performance measures for the
period 2002-2009. The numbers are stunning, especially given our
relatively modest size (12 regular faculty):
Extramural research
funding 2002 to 2009: approximately $17 million (total awards)
Faculty publications
2002-2009: 130 peer-reviewed papers, 11 books (authored or edited), 80 book chapters or other
publications
Faculty career recognition
Social and Behavioral Science College
Superior Research Award – Harvey Miller
(2004), Bing Xu (2006), Philip Dennison (2007)
University Consortium for Geographic Information
Science Young Scholars Award – Tom Cova (2003)
AAG Regional Development and Planning
specialty group Distinguished Scholarship award – Dennis Wei (2006)
Association of American Geographers (AAG)
Transportation Geography specialty group Edward L. Ullman award – Harvey Miller
(2009)
Graduate fellowships and awards
University of Utah Graduate Research Fellowship – Andrea
Dion (2002), Jeffrey VanLooy (2006)
NASA
Earth & Space Science fellowships – Elias Deeb (2006), Annie Bryant
and Evan Burgess (2009)
AAG Geographic Information Science
specialty group student paper competition first place paper awards - Scott Bridwell (2005), Edward Pultar (2007) Note:
the only two masters’students
to win in the history of the competition!
AAG Cryosphere specialty group R. S.
Tarr student paper competition poster
award - Elias Deeb (2005)
AAG Hazards specialty group Jeanne X.
Kasperson award - Laura Siebeneck (2008)
Geographic Information
Science 2008 international conference Best Poster award – Tetsuo Kobayashi
(2008)
Undergraduate fellowships and awards
NASA Earth Science Internship – Alex
Hogle (2003)
National
Geographic Internship – Kristen Hoschouer (2002)
University of Utah Young Alumni Outstanding Senior Award
– Tom Zumbado (2009)
University of Utah Undergraduate Research
Opportunities Program Research Assistantship – Edward Pultar (2005)
Pound for pound, there's no better department around! Experience the excellence of U-geography! Graduate application information can be found here.
Geography faculty (and 'expert climber') Larry Coats and others were recently featured on the PBS show "Time Team America: Range Creek."
Range Creek in eastern Utah is perhaps the most stunning archeaological find in North America in a century, and U-geographers (along with other U of U faculty, researchers and students) are involving in uncovering its wealth of information about the Fremont people and their fate.
From the Time Team America website:
Located in the remote Book Cliffs region of eastern Utah, Range Creek
is the kind of site archaeologists dream about. The sage-covered
meadows and rocky cliffs are scattered with the remnants of an ancient
people: pit houses half-buried in the sand, mysterious petroglyphs
scratched into the rock walls and bits of pottery and stone tools lying
where they were dropped over a thousand years ago. Best of all, most of
the hundreds of archaeological sites remain virtually untouched,
providing a rare opportunity to find out what may have happened to the
Fremont people who once flourished here. Time Team probes the ground,
scales the cliffs and learns what life was like in these canyons a
thousand years ago
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is publishing a paper based on Assistant Professor of Geography Tom Painter's research on desert dust, accelertaed snowmelt and its affects on alpine ecology.
From the University of Utah press release:
"Current mountain dust levels are generally five times greater than they
were prior to the mid-19th century, due in large part to increased
human activity in the deserts. This year, 12 dust storms have painted
the mountain snowpack red and advanced the retreat of snow cover,
likely by more than a month across Colorado. Under climate change,
warming and drying of the desert southwest is likely to result in
greater dust accumulation in the mountains.
'Earlier snowmelt by desert dust depletes the natural water reservoirs
of mountain snowpacks and in turn affects the delivery of water to
urban and agricultural areas,' said Tom Painter, Assistant Professor of Geography and Director of the Snow Optics Laboratory.
The new research, published this week by the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, now shows that this early snowmelt also
affects the life cycles of alpine plants and that the dust effect on
these plants differs from the effect of climate warming.
Ann Bryant and Evan Burgess awarded NASA Fellowships
Two Ph.D. students, Annie Bryant and Evan Burgess, have each been awarded a
NASA Earth & Space Science (ESS) Graduate Student Fellowship. This is a
competitive and prestigious award that speaks highly of each student's work, as
well as their advisors, Tom Painter and Rick Forster respectively. There
were 274 applicants this year for the 62 fellowships granted. The
fellowship is renewable for up to three years totaling $90,000 for each student.
Annie's
project is " Radiative forcing by desert dust in snowmelt-dominated
hydrologic systems from coupled satellite and in situ measurements".
Evan's research is “Mechanisms of Alaskan glacier motion through observation of
surface velocities and ice thickness”.
The purpose of the Fellowship program is for NASA Earth Science to train a
pool of highly qualified scientists in support of NASA's mission to use the
vantage point of space to understand and protect our home planet. NASA
understands that the future of Earth science rests with today's students, who
will be tomorrow's scientists and engineers.
Congratulations to both Ann and Evan and to their advisors Tom and Rick, too!
Ann Bryant
Evan Burgess
Dust storms causing early snowmelt
Assistant Professor of Geography Dr. Thomas Painter iresearch on dust storms and snowmelt has been reported in the national news media again, including the Los Anegles Times and the New York Times. An unprecedented number of major dust storms (twelve during the last three years), is speeding up the snowmelt runoff to rivers. Three storms that swept through southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado in late March and early April 2009 helped eliminate the snowpack along the entire western stretch of Colorado. The mountains usually remain snow-covered until mid-summer.
The increased dust levels are the result of grazing, mining, increased recreational use, and energy exploration. Soot from Asia and California's smog-emitting centers could also be contributing to early snowmelt. The dust and soot darkens the snow, allowing the surface to absorb more heat
from the sun. This warms the snow, and the air above it,
significantly. Officials are worried about drastic water shortages in late summers and a return to the Dust Bowl soil conditions of 1934. The Southwest's temperatures are expected to rise by 10 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.
Rick Forster receives 2009 ASUU Student Choice Award recognizing outstanding teaching
Dr. Rick Forster has been selected for a 2009 Associated Students of the University of Utah (ASUU) Student Choice Award. The award will be presented at a reception held in honor of the recipients on April 22nd, 2009. This award, completely student-driven, highlights the connection between students and teachers, and celebrates transformative experiences within the classroom.
Dr. Forster was nominated by Geography undergraduate student Julie Miller. She cited his patience with questions, availability for consultation, and generosity of time beyond his teaching excellence as reasons for the nomination. Julie summarized by saying that her "interaction with Professor Forster has been the most influential of my academic experience."
Congratulations, Rick! The recognition is well-deserved.
This is the second year in a row that a geography instructor has won the ASUU Student Choice Award. Clearly, geography is the students' choice!
Dennis Wei receives two specialty group awards at the AAG
During the 2009 conference of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Las Vegas, Nevada, Professor Yehua Dennis Wei was honored for his distinguished service by two specialty groups. The awards recognized his active and committed involvement with AAG's Asian Geography Specialty Group (AGSG) and Regional Development and Planning Specialty Group(RDPSG).
Dennis serviced as Chair (2006-2008), Secretary/Treasurer (2004-06), and Director of East Asia (2002-04) of AGSG. His service for RDPSG includes Chair (2007-2008), Vice Chair (2006-2007), Member at Large (2005-2006), and Director of Developing Countries (2000-2005).
Congratulations, Dennis!
Phil Dennison uses sattelites to spy on tree-eating bugs
A paper to be published soon in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment describes Assistant Professor Philip Dennison's research to track insects released to battle tamarisk in Southern Utah.
Tamarisk (also known as saltcedar) is a common invasive species alongrivers in the Western U.S. An insect that eats tamarisk, the saltcedarleaf beetle, was released in Grand County, Utah to control tamarisk. The beetle population exploded in 2007, and the beetles have defoliated tamarisk along the Colorado River for the past two summers. Dr. Dennison is using satellite data to map the defoliated areas and estimate the amount of water being saved by tamarisk defoliation.
Wildfire responses to abrupt climate change in North America
A groundbreaking paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by a team of researchers that include geography faculty Mitch Power and Andrea Brunelle challenges several previously-held views of abrupt climate chanage and its relationship with wildfires.
The research team, lead by Jennifer Marlon at the University of Oregon and including geographers Power and Brunelle from the University of Utah, used charcoal accumulations in lake sediments to study
changes in fire activity in North America at the end of the last Ice Age. Several
abrupt climate changes occurred at that time, including an increase in Greenland temperatures of over 5°C in less
than a few decades. This temperature jump happened at the end of a 1200 year-long cold period called the Younger
Dryas climate reversal. The team wanted to see whether fire regimes across the
continent showed any response to
such rapid warming. They were also looking for evidence of continental-scale wildfires 12,900 years ago, at the
beginning of the Younger Dryas cold period. Another team of researchers has argued that a
large comet exploded
over North America at that time,
triggering widespread fires as well as cooling.
Marlon and her co-authors found no
evidence for
such fires. But, they did find clear changes in biomass
burning and fire frequency whenever climate changed abruptly, particularly when temperatures increase. Before and after the Younger Dryas interval, fire activity rose
gradually and steadily in response to increasing temperatures,
which is consistent with the observed increases in
temperature and fire over the past few decades in North America.
Harvey Miller receives Edward L. Ullman Award from the AAG
The Transportation Geography specialty group of the Association of American Geographers announced that the 2009 Edward L. Ullman Award for significant
Contributions to Transportation Geography will be awarded to Dr. Harvey
Miller, Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the
University of Utah.
He was nominated by Nigel
Waters of George Mason University, who noted that "Dr. Miller is
perhaps best known to transportation geographers in North America for
his seminal text on transportation GIS, published in 2001 and
co-authored with Professor Shih-lung Shaw. Equally important has been
his work in time geography, time-space geography and the analysis of
accessibility in urban spaces. He has published over 35 peer-reviewed
papers in the most outstanding journals in his field and over 15 book
chapters.
"The Edward L. Ullman Award
has been offered by the Transportation Geography Specialty Group since
1990 for outstanding contributions to the field of transportation
geography. It is named in honor of Edward Ullman (1912-1976), a
distinguished transport geographer at the University of Washington who
made significant contributions to the study of spatial interaction,
railroads, and commodity flows, among many other topics (for a complete
review, see: http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/faculty/ullman.html).
Dr. Miller joins a long list of illustrious transport geographers who
have received this award (the full list is available at the TGSG
website: http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/tgsg/).
Associate Professor Tom Cova, Frank Drews (psychology), Laura
Siebeneck (geography) and Adrian Musters (psychology) have a paper forthcoming in Natural
Hazards Review that addresses many of the issues in the news regarding the
recent devastating bushfires in Victoria, Australia that have resulted hundreds of
fatalities.
The approach in Australia
for protecting communities is to avoid ordering mandatory evacuations in favor
of letting people decide whether they want to “prepare, stay and defend (property)
or leave early” when faced with a wildfire.Cova et al. note that this sets up a
difficult trade-off between protecting life (leaving early) and property
(staying) that citizens may not be able to make under the psychological duress
of a first encounter with extreme fire behavior.They also note that the Australian guideline
“structures protect people and people protect structures” is presented too much
like a law and may have misled people into believing that there was little risk
in harboring in their homes.Thirdly,
they note that the advice to “leave early” may not include enough content
regarding the timing of the arrival of a fast-moving wildfire for people to be
able to make an informed decision about when to leave.
Dr. Mitch Power, Assistant Professor of Geography and Curator of the Utah Museum of Natural History’s (UMNH) Garrett Herbarium will be delivering a lecture in the UMNH Nature of Things 2009 lecture series.
Dr. Power's lecture, "Challenges to living in Prehistoric Americas: Climate change, fires, and the arrival of the Europeans," will sheds new light on the role of humans
in shaping our relationship with the land during the past several
thousand years. With a just-published study of the links between climate change,
humans and wildfire, Dr. Power will explore how climate variability and
prehistoric landuse practices can inform our definition of
sustainability for the future.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
7:00 p.m. The City Library, Main Auditorium, Salt Lake City
Professor and Department Chair Harvey J. Miller delivered one of three keynote addresses at the 8th International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), in Pisa, Italy on December 18th, 2008. ICDM is the premier international conference for computer scientists and others working in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery from massive digital databases.
Harvey's address was titled "Geographic theory and geospatial knowledge discovery." In the lecture, he outlined a fundamental theory of geography and discussed how this theory could be used to guide geospatial data mining.
Professor and Department Chair Harvey J. Miller delivered at 8th Annual Reta A. Hayes
Lecture in the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M University on
November 21st, 2008.
The Haynes Lecture Series was established by Dr. Daniel Sui, professor of
Geography and holder of the Reta A. Haynes chair in Geosciences at Texas A&M University. Many
internationally recognized scholars and members of the National Academy
of Sciences have presented lectures since the series was established in 2000.
Icy worlds such as Titan, Europa, Enceladus, and others
may harbor the greatest volume of habitable space in the Solar System. For at
least five of these worlds, considerable evidence exists to support the
conclusion that oceans or seas may lie beneath the icy surfaces and that life
may well thrive in such cold, lightless oceans beneath many kilometers of
ice.This study will investigate what
processes may sustain life in these systems and deliver that life to the surface
where it can be seen from an orbiter, the ability of life forms to survive icy
world surface conditions, and the detectability of these life forms from
spectroscopic techniques.Ultimately,
this project prepares a path to flight for instrumentation that will visit one
or more of the icy worlds to rigorously search for life off of Earth in our
solar system.
Assistant Professor Mitch Power is featured in an article in the Salt Lake Tribune describing his research on global wildfire patterns over time. Dr. Power, who is also herbarium curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History, is part of an international effort to coordinate and analyze lake-bed data gathered around the
world to establish a global history of wildfire. Results suggest that the amount of biomass consumed
in wildfires globally dropped off precipitously after 1870 - despite
the rise in global temperatures widely believed to be a consequence of
industrialization.A paper on this research project appears in the October 1st issue of Nature Geoscience.
PhD candidate Tetsuo Kobayashi won the Best Poster
Presentation Award at the GIScience 2008 conference in Park City, Utah.GIScience is the premier event for the
international GIScience community, and Tetsuo was competing against established
scholars as well as other students.Tetsuo joins a long line of U-geography students who have won awards at
national and international meetings in recent years.This string of successes reflects the high
quality of our students, as well as the faculty who mentor them.
Associate Professor Tom Cova has been featured in an Los Angeles Times article about wildfire hazards in Mission Canyon outside Santa Barbara, CA. The article discusses his research on evacuating wildfire-prone neighborhoods. He notes that planning regulations around the country pay little attention to the
number of people who will have to use exit roads in a wildfire. The American West is studded with these "scenic firetraps," and in most of these areas the likelihood of an extreme
fire is increasing.
Here we grow again! (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Mitchell Power is joining our faculty as Assistant
Professor of Geography and Curator of the Garrett Herbarium, Utah Museum
of Natural History. Dr. Power earned the PhD in geography from
University of Oregon in 2006. His research and teaching interests
include Historical Biogeography, Fire, Paleoecology and
Paleoclimatology. He comes to U-Geography from the University of
Edinburgh in Scotland where he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and
co-leader of the Global Palaeofire Working Group.
Faculty position available: Tenure-track Assistant Professor of Geography
The Department of Geography at the
University of Utah invite applications for a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Geography
beginning 1 July 2009. We seek a geographer with a research emphasis that complements department strengths in one (or more) of the following areas: i) medical geography; ii) transportation; iii) human-environment interactions, including human dimensions of climate change; or, iv) hazards. Also desirable are technical strengths in GIS, cartography and/or spatial analysis.
Submit a letter of application including research and teaching interests, vitae, teaching evaluations (if available) and the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of three referees by 29 September 2008. Applications received after the deadline may be considered until the position is filled. The University of Utah is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer, encourages applications from women and minorities, and provides reasonable accommodations for the known disabilities of applicants and employees. The University of Utah values candidates who have experience working in settings with students from diverse backgrounds, and possess a strong commitment to improving access to higher education for historically underrepresented students.
Apply: Harvey J. Miller, Chair, University of Utah / Department of Geography / 260 S Central Campus Drive, Room 270 / Salt Lake City UT 84112-9155.
Dr. Mitch Power, Assistant Professor of Geography and Curator of the Utah Museum of Natural History’s (UMNH) Garrett Herbarium will be delivering a lecture in the UMNH Nature of Things 2009 lecture series.
