Faculty News

Promotions

Desheng Liu was promoted to Professor with research interests in remote sensing, spatial statistics, GIScience, and land cover change. He focuses on developing geospatial data analysis methodologies for monitoring and modeling environmental and ecological processes.

Alvaro Montenegro was promoted with tenure to Associate Professor with research interests in climate change, paleoclimatology, and climate modeling. His research encompasses various aspects of climate change and climate variability. His research focuses on the physical and biogeochemical processes occurring at the global and continental spatial scales.

Harvey Miller has been invited to serve on the editorial boards of the Annals and also Applied Geography.

Darla Munroe has accepted the position of Interim Chair of the Department of Geography. She will serve a one-year term beginning on July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019. A search for a new chair will get underway in the fall of 2018. In addition, she has been asked to join the Scientific Steering Committee of the Global Land Programme (GLP) for a three-year term beginning in June.

Morton O’Kelly has agreed to assume the role of SBS Divisional Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, beginning July 1, 2018. He will serve a five-year term.

Awards & Recognition

Morton O’Kelly is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement in Location Analysis Award from the INFORMS Section on Location Analysis. This is a triennial award for significant contributions, and cites pioneering efforts on hub network location.

Former colleague John Arnfield has been awarded the AAG Climate Specialty Group Lifetime Achievement Award.

Publications

Steven Quiring and Jordan Pino were featured in a NASA documentary on the Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite mission (SMAP). In the documentary, Steven talks about its use in power outage modeling.

Daniel Sui co-edited a book with Shih-Lung Shaw titled Human Dynamics Research in Smart and Connected Communities. The book addresses accelerating advances in information and communication technology that have fundamentally changed the way transportation systems work.

Madhumita Dutta co-edited: Strikes in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Perspective. Published by Rowman & Littlefield International. The collection of essays spans countries across the global South and North, providing an account of strikes and the working class resistance in the 21st century.

Joel Wainwright recently published a book, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future, coauthored with Geoff Mann. This book discusses the likely political and economic outcomes of missing the two degrees’ Celsius target set by the Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change.

A new book co-edited by Ola Ahlqvist and Christoph Schlieder, entitled Geogames and Geoplay: Game-based Approaches to the Analysis of Geo- Information, has just been published by Springer. This book discusses the fundamentals of games and play, geographic information technologies, game design and culture while moving through current examples and forward looking analysis.

Grants & Research

Alvaro Montenegro has received funds from the Steam Factory for a very interesting collaborative exercise: Bits in Digs aims to use computer models to acquaint history and archaeology researchers with state-ofthe-art, data-heavy climate and human migration computer models. This gives modelers a better understanding of the needs faced by historical and archaeological research and how these can become better incorporated in model development and analysis.

Joel Wainwright has received funds from InFACT (Initiative for Food and AgriCultural Transformation, a division of the discovery themes initiative) for his research on the drivers of food insecurity and agroecological change in the Maya milpas of southern Belize. The project is entitled: Making Maya milpa: maize farming, agroecological research, and food security in Belize and Ohio State. This research focuses on rural communities and improving food security with productive land and avoiding environmental degradation. He then intends to apply those methods and research to similar situations in farming communities in Ohio.

Harvey Miller has received funds from TDAI (Translational Data Analytics) for a very interesting project: Measuring and Analyzing Active Transportation Using Low-Cost Wireless Sensor Networks. In the project accurate, persistent, fine-grain counting of movement is expected to provide a powerful building block for data analytics in active transportation.

Desheng Liu received a National Science Foundation award. This collaborative research on Hydrologic and Permafrost Changes Due to Tree Expansion into Tundra is from NSF’s Office of Polar Programs. In addition, he also received USDA NIFA-CBG funding − “Strengthening agricultural and geospatial education and research at Central State University”. This three-year project is in collaboration with Central State University and aims to enhance agricultural geospatial education at CSU through offering summer workshops on geospatial technologies, as well as advance geospatial characterization of agricultural runoff using hyperspectral remote sensing to monitor water quality and harmful algal bloom in Maumee River Watershed and Lake Erie.

Elisabeth Root has received funding for her seed grant proposal: "Characterizing Communities Vulnerable to Opioid Addiction” from the IPR Leadership Committee. She has also received additional funding from the state of Ohio to expand her research in Infant Mortality Rates in the state of Ohio.

Steven Quiring received funding from the National Aeronautics & Space Administration for his work on Developing national soil moistureconvective precipitation feedbacks with soil moisture-active passive. In addition, Steven Quiring received an award from University of Hong Kong for work on Typhoon power outage modeling.

Ellen Mosley Thompson and her research team received funding from the National Science Foundation for their research on Climate and environmental variability over the last glacial cycle from ice cores in the Western Kunlun Mountains (Tibetan Plateau).

Zhengyu Liu received funding from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences for his research in Assessing and understanding extratropical control on tropical climate.