Four major Geography graduate awards were handed out just prior to the colloquium presentation on May 27. Our Chair, Professor Dar Roberts, presented the awards for Excellence in Teaching, Excellence in Research, the Leal Anne Kerry Mertes Scholarship Award, and the Jack & Laura Dangermond Graduate Fellowship.
Susan Tran won the annual Department of Geography Excellence in Teaching Award. 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 Geography Department’s Excellence in Research Award was awarded to Stacy Rebich Hespanha. The award is made annually to a graduate student whose national conference presentations, publications, research, and lab or field experiments are deemed exceptional. The competition was particularly keen this year, and Dar commented that any one of the entrants would have won in a previous year. Stacy, however, was one notch above the rest, with 8 peer-reviewed publications, including a paper in the Annals of the AAG.
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. 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. Nate Royal won this year’s graduate award; Nate is currently abroad, so Professor Dan Montello accepted it on his behalf. 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 Jack and Laura Dangermond Graduate Fellowship was won by Ed Pultar. This Fellowship is awarded to a promising graduate geography student in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 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.
Photos courtesy of grad students Gargi Chaudhuri and Alan Glennon
