Student Accomplishments, Awards and Kudos

PhD student Peng Gao has received a College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Dissertation Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year. Peng's working dissertation title is "Applying novel regionalization methods to the study of biotic distributions and connectivity".

Master's student Brittany Cook was awarded a nationally competitive Foreign Language Area Studies scholarship to study Arabic at an intensive summer program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Brittany will begin doctoral studies at the University of Kentucky in the fall of 2012.

Graduate student Bill Stangler has accepted the position of Congaree Riverkeeper. Bill has been active in exploring and helping others explore the river prior to this position. His thesis focused on the rocky shoals spider lilies found along portions of the Midland's rivers. (Fall 2011)

Graduate student Sara Flecher has been awarded the Carolina's Chapter of the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) Application and Research Scholarship ($1000). (spring 2012)

Graduate students Shufan Liu, Michael DuBois, Sara Flecher, and Leanne Sulewski accompanied Dr. Michael Hodgson to the NSF-sponsored first CyberGIS Project's All-Hands Meeting in September (2011). The meeting (see: http://cybergis.cigi.uiuc.edu/node/31) was hosted by Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.

An article co-authored by doctoral student Leanne Sulewski is featured in the current on-line issue of the ACSM Bulletin (October 2011 - # 253). The article (available to on-line or print subscribers) focuses on GIS activities in Bhutan and is titled GIS in the Himalayas.

PhD student Peng Gao has been named a recipient of a 2012 NASA-MSU Professional Enhancement Award, which helps to defray expenses for outstanding students to attend the Annual Symposium of the U.S. Regional Association of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (US-IALE). This year's US-IALE meeting will be held from April 8-12 in Newport, R.I.

Doctoral student Leanne Sulewski and undergraduate major Edward Walsh have both been awarded pretigious U.S. Geointelligence Foundation (USGIF) scholarships (http://usgif.org/) for the 2011-12 academic year. These scholarships are competative and carry with them a $5000 stipend. Aside from the honor of being chosen both award winners were invited to the GEOINT Symposium (October 16-19, 2011) in San Antonio, Texas.  The GEOINT Symposium is the preeminent intelligence event of the year, providing a forum where more than 4,000 attendees network with government, industry, academic and military leaders, learn from top leaders in the intelligence community.

Leanne is interested in applying geospatial methods to understanding, determining the threat from, and aiding in the response to natural and man made disasters. Her summer position with the SC Army National Guard as a GIS Analyst, working in conjunction with the SC Emergency Management Division and Joint Operations Center, sparked her interest in disasters as they relate to and effect national security and other geospatial intelligence concerns.

Edward is interested in geospatial techniques as they relate to national security issues. He spent the summers of 2010 and 2011 as an intern with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He also studied abroad in Egypt and Morocco during the spring of 2011 improving his Arabic and gaining an appreciation of the human geography of these two north African nations."

Graduate student Hu Wang won the Transactions in GIS Best Paper award at the UCGIS summer assembly in Boulder, CO June 22-23, 2011. The award was made based on his paper and oral presentation of "A New Method to Spatial Scan Statistics with Space Partitioning". Former USC Georgraphy student Ke Liao won this award in 2007.

Graduate students Brittany Cook and Bob Greeley have been granted $1,000 Walker Institute International Experience Awards to conduct research in Cyprus and Lebanon respectively.

Graduate student Josh Leisen won the AAG Biogeography Specialty Group masters grant competition to support his summer fieldwork.

Graduate student Natalie Jensen’s proposal to develop a distributed learning version of our Lands and Peoples of the World (GEOG 121) course was selected for funding.

PhD student Kimberly Meitzen received a 2011 NASA-MSU Professional Enhancement Award through the U.S. chapter of the International Association for Landscape Ecology. 

Undergraduate Stewart Bryant received a Magellan Scholarship from the Office of Undergraduate Research for his proposed work, “Detecting floodplain microtopography and sediment flux using terrestrial laser scanning.”

Nathan Kettle received a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant to support his research on the influence of risk, uncertainty, and cross-scalar relations on adaptation and vulnerability in US coastal communities. Nathan is currently pursuing his PhD in the department. (August 2010)

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