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September 2022: Di Zhu receives a grant from CURA entitled, “Sensing Geospatial Communities in Mobility Networks: How Human Movements Drive Dynamic Community Structures within the Twin Cities Metro Area.”

September 2022: Chelsea Cervantes De Blois wins a CLA Emerging Alumni Award. She investigates the impacts of climate change on human-environmental systems through intensive, in-country fieldwork and a commitment to cultural engagement. Her work as a climate change analyst for the U.S. Department of State centers a domestic and international commitment to improving communities affected by environmental changes.

February 2022: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois starts a new position as the Climate Change Analyst for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research's Office of the Geographer and Global Issues (GGI) in the US Department of State.

October 2021. Eric Shook and Steven Manson are part of a $15,000,000 NSF project Using Data to Understand the Risks and Impact of Climate Change, a new national initiative to enable geospatial data-driven scientific discovery to better understand the risks and impacts of climate change.

October 2021. Steven Manson is PI of a new $1,000,000 NSF project HNDS-I: From Stacks to Stats: Unlocking International Census Data from Print Volumes with S. Ruggles, E. Roberts, T. Kugler, and L Cleveland. IHGIS integrates, preserves, and disseminates data describing characteristics of the human population and the environment. This project incorporates data from thousands of population and agricultural censuses into IPUMS-IHGIS.

April 2021. Brittany Krzyzanowski wins a multi-year postdoc fellowship at the Racette Laboratory in the Neurology Department at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, where she will contribute her expertise in GIScience and health geography to investigations of the impact of environmental exposures on Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and Alzheimer's disease."

July 2020: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois wins the GEOINT's United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) Doctoral Scholarship.

July 2020: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois wins the Best Student Paper from the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Eurasian Specialty Group's Student Paper Competition for her paper, "Conditions for Ethnic Conflict in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Applying Multi-Criteria Evaluation to Ethnic Conflict in Kyrgyzstan."

May 2020. Brittany Krzyzanowski won a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for her project "Sharing Fine Resolution Protected Health Information: Using Regionalization to create HIPAA Compliant Aggregations."

May 2020: Kathryn Grace won three major grants. 1) Connecting West Africa users to cutting edge resources: Integrating satellite observations and sub-seasonal climate forecasts to enhance agricultural and pastoral water-management decision-making using 21st century agro-pastoral water deficit predictions (USAID-NASA, $705,142). This project is focused on developing strategies for predicting sub-seasonal climate variation for food aid and humanitarian planning attending to the diversity of livelihood strategies within Niger. The project team is a collaborative mix of scientists at UCSB, UMN, Columbia and the climate agency in Niger; 2) Early identification and forecasts of reduced-yield agricultural seasons in the Developing World Funded by US Agency for International Development (USAID, $1.8 million). This project focuses on the linkages between climate, food insecurity, health, and livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa. The project team includes scientists at UCSB and UMN and field scientists in Kenya, Niger, and Guatemala; and 3) Microdata for Research on Aging in the Global South (NIH, $3.1 million). This project focuses on the harmonization of census data in the global south with attention to health impacts over the life course of individuals living in poor countries. The project team includes Steve Ruggles (UMN History), Lara Cleveland (UMN MPC), Matt Sobek (UMN MPC).

October 2019: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois wins two student poster awards for “Visually Linking Azerbaijan’s Social Inequality & Environmental Vulnerability" and "Where are 'Human Rights' positioned within the Environment? A Closer Look at the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)”​ at the West Lakes Division of the American Association of Geographers (WLDAAG) 2019 Annual Meeting.

October 2019: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois is featured by the US State Department for her summer studying Azerbaijani in Baku, Azerbaijan as an awardee of the 2019 U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program.

April 2019: Eric Shook and colleagues won a UMN CURA Faculty Interactive Research Program (FIRP) Grant to create the first open dataset of Minnesota farm fields by combining satellite imagery, supercomputers, and advanced geospatial computation techniques.

April 2019: Somayeh Dodge won an NSF award as the sole PI of the project "Visual Principles of Motion: A Theoretical Framework for the Cartography of Movement." ($308,218)

April 2019: Bryan Runck is first author on a paper "Using word embeddings to generate data-driven human agent decision-making from natural language" in Geoinformatica.

April 2019: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois wins a Poster Award for her poster "Which Region of Kyrgyzstan is Most Vulnerable to Ethnic Conflict? Evidence from Fieldwork" at the Population Association of America's (PAA) annual meeting in the poster session on Population, Development, and the Environment.

April 2019: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois was awarded Best Student Paper from the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Eurasian Specialty Group's Student Paper Competition for her paper, Mapping Azerbaijan's vulnerability: analysis of toxic hotspots and migration. She also won second place in the Cartography Specialty Group's Illustrated Paper Competition for her presentation on Mapping Azerbaijan's regional vulnerability: analysis of pollutant and demographic data.

April 2019: Brittany Krzyzanowski is first author on a paper "Use of a Geographic Information System to create treatment groups for group-randomized community trials: The Minnesota Heart Health Program" in Trials.

March 2019: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois was awarded the FLAS fellowship to study Intermediate Persian (2019-2020) and won a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) for Advanced Azerbaijani language study and to conduct dissertation research in the field during Summer 2019.

March 2019: HEGIS and SIL member Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois invited to the Colorado Boulder's Population Center's Migration, Climate, Health mini-conference to present her research on Azerbaijan's environmental vulnerability.

March 2019: HEGIS alum Chris Crawford appointed Research Physical Scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey with a duty location at EROS in South Dakota.

February 2019: HEGIS and SIL member Brittany Krzyzanowski wins an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year.

September 2018: Steven Manson and colleagues won $4 million from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health to advance the big data of human-environment research via the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS).

August 2018: Eric Shook wins an NSF grant for the project Hour of Cyberinfrastructure: Developing Cyber Literacy for Geographic Information Science, which integrates cyberinfrastructure skill building into domain-specific curricula to build a sustainable learning community for hundreds of educators and students at an array of universities and colleges. 

June 2018: Ying Song wins a UMN Digital Technology Initiative Seed Grant to apply machine learning and deep learning algorithms to understand station-based car-sharing behaviors. This is part of Ying's work on utilizing high-resolution movement data to understand multi-modal travel behaviors for use in sustainable transportation planning and management.

March 2018: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois wins COGS Conference Travel Grant to present a collaborative paper, "Permafrost Degradation and Coastal Erosion in the US and Russia: Opportunities for Collaboration in Addressing Shared Climate Change Impacts" with the Stanford-US Russian Forum (SURF) Climate and Environmental Working Group at Stanford University.

February 2018: MPC Summer 2018 Diversity Fellowship program sponsors Somayeh Dodge's project on Exploring Spatiotemporal Patterns & Accessibility of Nice Ride in Twin Cities. For more details and to apply please see Minnesota Population Center Summer Diversity Fellowship

January 2018: Somayeh Dodge is co-organizing a GIScience workshop on Analysis of Movement Data (AMD’18), to be held on 28 August 2018 in Melbourne, Australia.

January 2018: Maryia Bakhtsiyarava wins the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship (2018-2019) and will work with the Center for Global Health and Social Responsibility to improve our understanding of the interplay between climate variability and nutritional outcomes. 

December 2017: Somayeh Dodge have been awarded a Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry, and Scholarship from the Office of the Vice President for Research for a project on Modeling Movement Interactions Between Tigers and Leopards. 

October 2017: Maryia Bakhtsiyarava wins a COGS Conference Travel Grant to present a paper on agricultural specialization, climate, and child nutrition at the International Population Conference organized by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population in Cape Town, South Africa. 

October 2017: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois wins COGS Conference Travel Grant to present a collaborative paper on climate and environmental migration in Russia and Alaska at the Stanford U.S.- Russia (SURF) in Moscow, Russia. 

Oct 2017. Kathryn Grace has been appointed to a Grand Challenge Research Scholar Collaborative on the theme "Clean Water and Sustainable Ecosystems/Just and Equitable Communities."

Oct 2017. Steve Manson and Eric Shook are featured in 'Bringing Depth to Big Data' that highlights how researchers in the College of Liberal Arts are embracing big data.

Sept 2017. Steven Manson and colleagues win a research grant for $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation Sociology and Data Infrastructure Programs for the project "IPUMS-Terra: Global Population and Agricultural Data." Dr. Manson is joined by U of M researchers Lara Cleveland, Jack DeWaard, Steven Ruggles, and Leah Samberg. IPUMS Terra integrates, preserves, and disseminates data describing characteristics of the human population and the environment. This project incorporate data from over 1,000 population and agricultural censuses into IPUMS Terra.

December 2016: Graduate student opportunities in GISc in the Department of Geography, Society, and Environment at the University of Minnesota. Now recruiting MGIS, MA, and PhD students.

October 2016: Kathryn Grace, with colleagues from several universities, was awarded a $2.8 million NSF INFEWS (Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems) grant to investigate coupled human-environment system dynamics in Mali and Ethiopia.

September 2016: Somayeh Dodge co-organized a pre-GIScience workshop in Montreal, Canada, on "Analysis of Movement Data" covering 11 research presentations, a panel, and two break-out group discussions. The workshop brought together over 30 scientists and students to discuss current trends, research gaps, and future directions of movement research in GIScience.

August 2016: Someyeh Dodge awarded a very competitive opportunity to organize a Dagstuhl seminar titled "From Observations to Prediction of Movement." Schloss Dagstuhl facilitates communication and interaction between researchers in computer science and related disciplines by supporting and hosting high quality and engaging seminars and workshops. 

June 2016: Maryia Bakhtsiyarava and Kathryn Grace win a MPC Research Collaboration Award for the project Comparative analysis of the relationship between climate variability, agricultural specialization and children's health: evidence from Kenya and Mali.

May 2016: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois win a NACIS Travel Grant for the NACIS conference in Colorado Springs, in October 2016.

April 2016: Steven Manson is named Scholar of the College for the U of M's College of Liberal Arts. 

March 2016: Chelsea L. Cervantes De Blois was awarded a full FLAS fellowship to study Russian, won a MPC Diversity Fellowship for this summer, and picked up a COSP Travel Grant to travel to the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) conference 

February 2016: Dudley Bonsal appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at James Madison University.

October 2015: Joseph Krenzelok (BS) won the Minnesota GIS/LIS Student Scholar Award for his project, "Detecting Terminus Advance and Velocity of Hubbard Glacier, Alaska, Using Image Correlation Techniques."

September 2015: Jenny Immich is a GIS lecturer in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science at the Metropolitan State University of Denver.

April 2015: Brittany Krzyzanowski wins a COGS travel grant to attend the Esri User Conference.

April 2015: Adam Berland appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Ball State University.

March 2015: Chris Crawford starts a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Maryland's Earth Systems Science Interdisciplinary Center.

February 2015: Jerry Shannon becomes Assistant Professor in Geography at University of Georgia.

September 2014: HEGIS welcomes new graduate students (see people).

September 2014: Shipeng Sun appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at University of Illinois Springfield.

September 2014: Jennifer Immich appointed GIS Teaching Fellow at Middlebury College.

May 2013: Chris Crawford receives a 2013-2014 NASA Post-Doctoral Fellowship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

January 2013: Jerry Shannon takes a three year position as temporary assistant professor in Geography at University of Georgia.

October 2012: Sami Eria becomes a Support Analyst with the ArcObjects SDK Unit with Esri in Redlands, California.

May 2012: Alex Amodovar served as a MATCH ambassador for International Student and Scholar Services, which involved a $350 grant and certificate of service to the University of Minnesota.

April 2012: Jerry Shannon receives an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.

September 2011: Jerry Shannon receives a U of M Graduate School Fellowship.

August 2011: Adam Berland appointed Visiting Instructor, Miami University (OH), Institute for the Environment and Sustainability and Geography.

May 2011: Heather Sander takes a job in the Department of Geography, University of Iowa.

April 2011: Steven Manson receives and Outstanding Reviewer Award, Environmental Modelling and Software.

April 2011: Debs Ghosh takes a job in the Department of Geography, University of Connecticut.

April 2011: Chris Crawford elected to the Cryosphere Specialty Group Board of Directors of the Association of American Geographers.

April 2011: Jerry Shannon awarded a Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship and the Ralph Hall Brown Prize for best graduate student publication

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