Funded Ph.D. positions are available in Dr. Morteza Karimzadeh’s research group at the Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder, starting Fall 2021. The application deadline is December 1, 2020. The positions are supported through TA and RA appointments.

The successful candidates will join a vibrant and growing team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Our current spatial data science projects intersect with geovisual analytics, GeoAI and spatial statistics in a variety of domains including sea ice mapping and cryospheric data fusion, quantitative analysis of human mobility, geo-text analysis of various organizational and archival textual sources, and modeling spatial connectivity and dependence.

Details about the program can be found here. Please also note that we have a graduate application fee waiver for under-represented minority applicants and applicants with financial need. 

For inquiries, please feel free to contact me at karimzadeh@colorado.edu with your CV, explaining how your research expertise or interests may align with my work, and what potential areas you’d be interested in working on in the future.

Encroachment or Opportunity? Geography in a World of Interdisciplinary Programs.
4:30-5:50 Eastern Time, October 23, 2020.

This webinar features Grant Saff (Hofstra University), Melissa Gilbert (Temple University), Kavita Pandit (Georgia State University), and Hengchun Ye (California State University Los Angeles). 

At issue are the opportunities and challenges faced by geography departments among a growing number of interdisciplinary programs in closely related fields such Environmental Studies, Global and International Studies, GIScience, Urban Studies, Geosciences, Environmental Science and Sustainability Studies.  Sometimes geographers have built alliances with nearby disciplines, but sometimes competition has ensued.  These issues have led to questions about rebranding, renaming, merging or blending geography with other programs.  The four panelists, leaders in their fields, have faced these questions in a range of universities.

This webinar is free and open to all interested parties.

To register, please visit: zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QRQM3roPQ72_DRud2Xu_vw

This webinar is organized as a special event within the concurrent Middle State regional AAG meeting and the Race, Ethnicity, and Place conference.  This is a free event within those meetings and open to all.

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Positive Steps Toward Tenure: Developing Successful Trajectories in Research, Teaching and Service.
2:50-3:40 p.m. Eastern Time, October 30, 2020:

Join panelists Katherine Hankins (Georgia State University), Lindsay Naylor (University of Delaware), Benjamin Ofori-Amoah (Western Michigan University), Lily House Peters (California State University Long Beach), as they discuss the many questions that arise as early career faculty move toward tenure review.

This webinar is free and open to all interested parties.

To register, please visit: zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9vuCuntbQ8uJwCTrVr9uDQ

This webinar is organized as a special event within the concurrent East Lakes regional AAG meeting. This is a free event within that meeting and open to all.

Information about the entire fall webinar series can be found at: www.aag.org/careerwebinars.

Call for Virtual Reality (VR) Field Trip Organizers

Help create a well-rounded, dynamic experience of AAG’s 2021 Annual Meeting, by participating in the development of virtual reality field trips. Join the member-led effort to harness VR technology for rich, virtual engagements with the geography of Seattle and the surrounding region.

How to Get Involved:

Help identify field trip topics of interest to geographers. Topics can span the entire breadth of the discipline of geography (e.g. urban geography, place, culture, fluvial geomorphology). If you have an idea or a topic you would have liked to explore yourself in place, please fill out the details in this form.

Join a virtual “tour guide” team. Join in small teams to organize virtual tours, drawing from your expertise and experience as “tour guides” in and around the Seattle area. This would involve writing the storyboard, selecting stops along a tour and introducing the location or area – in text, audio, or potentially video. If you are interested in this slightly-more-involved role, please fill out the details here.

Make the VR content. Help convert tour materials to a format suitable for consumption, using simple VR tech like Google Cardboard. If you are familiar with creating VR content or enthusiastic about learning, then please use this form to register your interest.

Last but not least, participate in a virtual field trip. If you are registered for AAG 2021 Seattle, congratulations! The virtual field trips will have room for you, no advanced sign-up or payment required, although each participant will need to acquire their own VR viewer (Cardboard viewers used with smartphones are available online for as little as $10).

Details about virtual tour options will be available soon through the annual meeting website. Once the meeting is over, the field trips will be shared for free.

We will start assembling teams in the 3rd week of October (even more info is here)

Best, 

Rebecca Shakespeare (rebecca.shakespeare@tufts.edu)
Dipto Sarkar (dipto.sarkar@carleton.ca) 
Karen Kemp (kakemp@usc.edu)

Up to five graduate assistantships in the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte at the intersection of health and GIS.

The Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) is recruiting several graduate students to immediately fill research assistantships for recently awarded projects. Preference will be given to applicants who can start in the Spring 2021 semester. 

• One Ph.D. student with expertise in geostatistical modeling and environmental health. The student will work on developing rapid interpolation techniques to detect unusually high concentrations of contaminants in water from private wells in Gaston County, near Charlotte. This is a five-year project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The candidate will have a strong background in programming, spatial and/or geostatistics. The student will work in tandem with the second hires.
  
• Two graduate students (Ph.D. or master level) with expertise in dashboard development to map environmental health data. The students will work on developing public- and expert-based dashboards (ESRI, Tableau or other platforms) to map unusually high concentrations of contaminants in water from private wells in Gaston County, near Charlotte. This is a five-year project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The candidates will have excellent skills in programming, spatial and/or geostatistics, GIS.
  
• Two graduate students (Ph.D or master level) with expertise in Web GIS dashboard development for COVID19 wastewater surveillance. The student will work on the development of a Web GIS-driven dashboard for the analytics and mapping of wastewater data that will help monitor the COVID-19 information. This project is currently funded by UNC-Charlotte, with NIH funding pending. The candidate will have a strong background in Web GIS, CyberGIS, GIS-based programming, and good writing skills. 

The students will be housed in the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science (http://gis.uncc.edu), and will be provided with powerful computers and have access to cyberinfrastructure-enabled high performance computing resources. Interested students should apply immediately to the Ph.D. program in Geography, Master of Arts Program in Geography, or Master of Science in Earth Sciences. The programs are waiving the GRE test. Students will receive 9-months stipend (four years for Ph.D. students, and two years for master students), including full tuition and health benefits. Summer support is also possible based on performance. 

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte is the second largest campus in the state, with state-of-the-art geospatial computing facilities. Charlotte is the largest city in North Carolina. Contact Dr. Eric Delmelle (eric.delmelle@uncc.edu) & Dr. Wenwu Tang (WenwuTang@uncc.edu) for more information.

The American Association of Geographers is piloting 2 workshops next week that may be of particular interest to the experiences of graduate students during COVID-19. The pilot is the first phase of a new AAG program meant to support graduate students in adapting their research to this new virtual reality. After this pilot, they will develop and share a call for more workshop proposals. Each workshop is intended to showcase a research method in geography that is feasible during the pandemic or showcase a method’s new strategies to adapt to the pandemic.

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• Pilot Workshop (1) by Dr. Iain Hay: The strength to cope with Qualitative Research Methods in a Pandemic! (September 11th – September 14th)
  • Register here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcsc-6hqTwjGdOBwvFTb_hjmLOFZe8rSVgP
• Pilot Workshop (2) by Dr. Joslyn Zale: Is this pandemic the time I will learn GIS basics? (September 13th – September 16th)
  • Register here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMoc-qrpzMsG9fK8eknTPT9vhLIaM49rC1t

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Students will be encouraged to attend as many workshops as they can to gain a better understanding of the versatility of geography, its possibilities, and so they can adapt their method or process in case it was impacted by the pandemic. These workshops will also serve as a venue for students of any geographic speciality to connect with one another.

If you have any questions about this pilot program, please do not hesitate to contact Coline Dony (cdony@aag.org) and Julati Nilupaer (jnilupaer@aag.org)

Hi GSAG Community:

Please see the conference information below, which includes a student paper competition opportunity!

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Call for papers: COVID-19 and Vulnerable Populations 

The 2020 Race, Ethnicity, and Place (REP) Conference will be held virtually, October 22-23. Session proposals and paper abstracts are due September 1. For full details on registration, abstract submission, session proposal submission, and our NSF-funded workshop to support HBCU and MSI geographers, go to www.repconference.org.

This year’s virtual REP 2020 will feature:

• Special paper sessions on Covid-19 and vulnerable populations as well as general REP theme sessions.
• REP student paper competition
• On-line opening happy hour session on the evening of October 21 (BYO)

Send questions to raceethnicityplace@gmail.com

We hope to see you virtually in October,

Mark Barnes, Morgan State University
Sarah Blue, Texas State University
Joseph Wood, University of Baltimore

Elections for GSAG 2020-2021 Officers will take place virtually between Wednesday July 29, 2020 and Friday July 31, 2020.  Nominations for Vice-Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, and Community Builders will be accepted until Friday July 24, 2020. To nominate yourself or someone else, please e-mail gsag.chair@gmail.com with the name and contact information of your nominee. If you are nominating yourself, please include a brief bio and a short statement on why you are interested in the position.  Officer positions and responsibilities include:

• Vice-Chair: Serve as a replacement for the chair in case they cannot continue with their duties or in the case of graduation.  This position requires a two years minimum commitment; on the first year, they will serve as Vice-Chair, and on the second year, they will take over the Chair position.  As Vice-Chair, they will help monitor the implementation of short-term goals, assist the Chair to fulfill their responsibilities, and organize relevant AAG sessions/activities as desired.
• Treasurer: Gets checks for grantees, communicate between the AAG and award winners to ensure that they receive their checks, stay aware of all GSAG finances, reports on membership numbers and budget (liaison between AAG and GSAG on all financial matters), collaborate with the organization on relevant AAG sessions/activities as desired.
• Secretary: Solicit information, prepare, and send out a biannual newsletter, keep minutes at GSAG meetings, maintain website and social media presence, collaborate with the organization on relevant AAG sessions/activities as desired.
• Community Builders: solicits information to be shared via website and social media, grow and maintain GSAG presence, keep organization membership informed of opportunities and events related to graduate students and the GSAG community, assist in organizing the social event at the AAG annual meeting and collaborate with the organization on relevant AAG sessions/activities as desired.

GSAG is an inclusive organization, and all who run for election (regardless of outcome) are invited to serve as board members.  We welcome your input and encourage your participation.

Check out our newsletter to see information about Denver 2020, recap of Washington DC 2019, graduate student accomplishments, and great resources available to you!

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2019: June 23-29 at George Washington University in Washington, DC – Deadline to Apply is June 1, 2019

Resister here Check out the Flier for 2019

The early career workshop is open to graduate students and faculty who are just beginning their careers in higher education — instructors, lecturers, assistant professors, and other untenured faculty. The one-week program is open to faculty from all types of teaching and research institutions inside and outside the US. The workshop, sponsored by the American Association of Geographers, focuses on topics which are frequently the greatest sources of stress in the first years of a faculty appointment, including:

• Developing significant learning experiences for your students
• Career planning
• Time management
• Getting the most out of academic conferences
• Ethics in research, teaching, and advising
• Nuts-and-bolts issues about writing and publishing
• Preparing a CV, job search and interviewing
• Promoting collegiality
• Preparing for the tenure process
• Balancing personal and professional life

The workshop touches on issues of teaching and learning, particularly those revolving around designing effective courses, issues of diversity and inclusion, and active pedagogy. The goal of the workshop is to help participants balance the many responsibilities of academic life and to understand how their teaching, research, service, outreach, and personal lives intersect and interconnect. Most participants have built lasting networks among themselves and with workshop leaders.

You do not need to be a member of the American Association of Geographers to register for the workshop or to enter the website. Follow the instructions to “Sign Up” for a temporary password if you are not an AAG member. Enrollment is on a first-come, first-served basis.