Geography Welcomes New Affiliated Faculty

Affiliated faculty in the Department of Geography participate in instructional activities, including serving on MA and PhD committees, but they are salaried by other departments or institutions. Geography currently has nine affiliated faculty, including the recent addition of Mary Hegarty and Christina Tague.

Mary Hegarty is a Professor and the Vice-Chair in the Department of Psychology, UCSB whose research interests include spatial cognition, comprehension, reasoning, and individual differences. To quote her web site, “Mary Hegarty received her BA and MA from University College Dublin, Ireland. She worked as a research assistant for three years at the Irish national educational research centre before attending Carnegie Mellon, where she received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 1988. She has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychology, UCSB since then. The author of over 60 articles and chapters on spatial cognition, diagrammatic reasoning, and individual differences, she is co-editor of an edited book on diagrammatic reasoning and inference. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Society. a former Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, is on the editorial board of /Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition/ and is a member of the governing board of the Cognitive Science Society. Her current research is funded by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation” http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/hegarty/index.php.

Christina Tague is an Assistant Professor at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. To quote her web site, “Her research interests include studying interactions between hydrology and ecosystem processes and exploring how eco-hydrologic systems are altered by climate and land use change. Her work focuses on the development and use of spatial simulation models to integrate data from a variety of sources and generalize results from intensive field-based monitoring studies to larger watersheds. Dr. Tague is one of the principal developers of RHESSys, Regional hydro-ecologic simulation system, a coupled model of spatially distributed carbon, water and nitrogen cycling. This modeling approach seeks to provide science-based information on spatial patterns of vulnerability in water quantity and quality, and ecosystem health. Current projects include modeling climate change impacts on summer streamflow patterns in the mountains of the Western US, and examining how urbanization alter drainage patterns and associated biogeochemical cycling at part of the Baltimore Long Term Ecological Research Site and in selected Southern California watersheds. Dr. Tague received her Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto, Canada and has an undergraduate degree from the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada” .

A warm welcome to both Mary and Christina!