Five major Geography graduate awards and two undergraduate awards were handed out just prior to the Geography Colloquium presentation on May 26. Our Chair, Professor Dar Roberts, presented the graduate awards for Excellence in Teaching, Excellence in Research, the Leal Anne Kerry Mertes Scholarship Award, the David S. Simonett Memorial Award, and the Jack & Laura Dangermond Graduate Fellowship, as well as the undergraduate Nicholas Bourdakis Memorial Award and the Jack & Laura Dangermond Undergraduate Fellowship.
- 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 the award was Keely Roth
- 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 went to Eliza Bradley
- 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. 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. 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. Erin Mordecai (Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology) won this year’s graduate award which was accepted on her behalf by a friend, Dave Viola.
- 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 honor of him. Simonett was the first chairman of the Department of Geography from 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 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 Indy Hurt.
- 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 Indy Hurt.
Undergraduate Awards: Undergraduate awards are normally handed during our Geography pre-graduation reception (this year on June 11th), but two of this year’s award recipients will not be able to be present at the reception, so we celebrated their accomplishments on May 26:
- The Nicholas Bourdakis Memorial Award was established after the tragic death of Nicholas, who died in February 2001 when struck by a car in Isla Vista. He had just declared Geography as his major. This fund helps to keep Nick’s memory alive by supporting future generations of outstanding undergraduate students in Geography at UCSB. It is awarded to the newly declared Geography major with the highest GPA. This year’s recipient of the Nicholas Bourdakis Memorial Award was Lisa Berry.
- 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 Adam Rottman-Hipps.
