The Department gave six major Geography graduate awards this academic year: Excellence in Teaching, Excellence in Research, the Leal Anne Kerry Mertes Scholarship Award, the David S. Simonett Memorial Award, the Jack Estes Memorial Award, and the Jack & Laura Dangermond Graduate Fellowship. Awards were presented by Geography Chair Dar Roberts during Geography Colloquium on May 31, 2012. Undergraduate awards are normally handed out during our Geography Graduation Reception (this year on June 16th), but two of this year’s award recipients will not be graduating this June, so we celebrated their accomplishments at the graduate ceremony as well.
Graduate Awards:
- Excellence in Teaching: This award is presented to Geography graduate students who have outstanding course evaluations as TAs and/or instructors, outstanding written comments from students, outstanding evaluations of TA work by the course instructor, and outstanding design of course or lab syllabi or outstanding design of lab or section activities. The recipient of this year’s award was Grant McKenzie
- Excellence in Research: This award is made annually to a graduate student whose national conference presentations, publications, research, and lab or field experiments are deemed exceptional. This year’s award was split between Kate Deutsch and Yihong Yuan
- The Leal Anne Kerry Mertes Scholarship Award was established to honor Leal Mertes by supporting UCSB students (graduate or undergraduate) who are planning or are engaged in field research in the natural sciences. Leal Mertes was a Geography faculty member who investigated rivers, wetlands, and floodplains globally. Her interests spanned the dynamics of river channel, floodplain, and wetlands interactions; the remote sensing of wetland environments; and the long term evolution of large river systems. She also devoted a great deal of effort to educational issues, including curriculum design and assessment. The Leal Mertes Scholarship is awarded to talented and deserving UCSB students enrolled in any UCSB department where scientific fieldwork is conducted. For the purposes of this scholarship, “field work” is defined as any off-campus activity devoted to studying, observing, sampling, investigating, or measuring natural or human phenomena. This year’s award was shared by Andrea Adams (Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology – she was out of town, but her advisor, Prof. Sam Sweet, received the award on her behalf) and Dana Bardolph (Dept. of Anthropology)
- The David S. Simonett Memorial Award was established in memory of David S. Simonett, Professor of Geography at UCSB from 1975 until his death on December 22, 1990. A world-renowned authority in the field of remote sensing, Simonett was a founding director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, and the UC Board of Regents renamed UCSB’s division of the NCGIA in his honor. Simonett was the first chairman of the Department of Geography (1975 to 1982) and Dean of Students until 1989, and he provided the initial vision and energy to build what has become one of the nation’s finest Geography Departments here at UCSB. The criteria used for this award are service to the department and the discipline of Geography, academic progress, academic accomplishment, and length of time in the program. The recipient will be the student who best exemplifies the values that David Simonett established for the graduate program at UCSB. The student selected to receive this award this year was Katharine (Kitty) Currier.
- The Jack Estes Memorial Award was established in memory of Jack Estes, a Geography faculty member for over thirty years and the Director of the Geography Remote Sensing Unit. His primary research interests involved the use of remote sensing and geographic information systems technology for analysis of earth resources. Among the agencies he conducted studies for were NASA on land-use change, crop identification and advanced soil moisture conditions; the U.S. Forest Service on monitoring and modeling fire fuels; and the Environmental Protection Agency on hazard and pollution and modeling and resources management. This fund was established to support students who are continuing his field of research. This year’s Jack Estes Memorial award recipient was Maiana Hanshaw.
- The Jack and Laura Dangermond Graduate Fellowship is awarded to a promising graduate geography student in Geographic Information Science in the department of Geography. The recipient will hold the title “The Jack and Laura Dangermond Fellow” in residence and receives a stipend, allowing its holder to devote more time to imaginative and creative research. Jack and Laura Dangermond are the co-founders and President and Executive Vice President respectively of Environmental Systems Research Institute. ESRI is a major industrial supplier of software in the field of GIS. Jack Dangermond currently serves on the board of directors of the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science at UC Santa Barbara. This year, the Jack and Laura Dangermond Graduate Fellowship was awarded to Grant McKenzie.
Undergraduate awards:
- The Samantha C. Ying Gamma Theta Upsilon Scholarship is made possible by Killian and Joan Ying who created the award in honor of their daughter Samantha upon the occasion of completing her PhD. Samantha Ying had an outstanding undergraduate career at UCSB, graduating with a BS in both Microbiology and Physical Geography in 2004. She won the Robert L. Sinsheimer Award in Molecular Biology, and she received the top honors of Outstanding Achievement, Distinction in the Major, and the Chair’s Award for Excellence in Geography, as well as being awarded Geography’s Jack and Laura Dangermond Undergraduate Fellowship. She received her PhD from Stanford’s Department of Environmental Earth System Science in 2011. This scholarship is used to support undergraduate students based on the criteria of academic achievement and compelling family/personal circumstances, giving highest consideration to those students who are active or contributing members of the Theta Nu Chapter of Gamma Theta Upsilon. This year’s recipient of the Samantha C. Ying Scholarship was Kayee Leung.
- The Jack and Laura Dangermond Undergraduate Fellowship – Jack and Laura Dangermond have also established a fellowship award for a promising undergraduate geography student with an emphasis in Geographic Information Science in the Department of Geography. This year’s award went to Arunima Rashidee.
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