Marta Jankowska, a graduate student in our joint program with SDSU, has just been officially notified from the National Science Foundation that she has been awarded a Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for her project “Doctoral Dissertation Research: Integrating Space and Place into Children’s Perceptions of Environmental Health Hazards.” The work is under the direction of John R. Weeks (Principal Investigator). This award is effective September 1, 2011 and expires August 31, 2013.
David López-Carr, a primary advisor on her PhD committee, described Marta’s academic qualifications for the award as follows: “Marta’s proposed research builds on a deep and rich experience and network of scholars as part of the larger National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant R01: “Health, Poverty, and Place: Modeling Inequalities in Accra Using RS and GIS”, for which her dissertation advisor is PI. Her proposed graduate research project continues her extensive experience in conducting research in and about Accra, Ghana. Her Masters work concerned delineating neighborhood boundaries for multi-level modeling of women’s health in Accra, Ghana. For the “Examining the Places We Live” paper competition (Marta was a finalist among a highly competitive applicant pool), sponsored by USAID and the World Bank, she explored multiple faces of vulnerability in Accra with a focus on slum areas. She is currently working on an academic paper that builds on her previous vulnerability research to explore how women’s health and vulnerability dynamics interact in Accra. In addition to her success in the World Bank paper competition, Marta also won the highly competitive Population Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers Student Paper Award, in which she focused on the geodemographics of slum areas in Accra. Additionally, she has won awards from The National Academy of Sciences to attend the three month long Young Summer Scientists Program at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, Austria, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to attend the prestigious 2008 GIScience Conference, and the Alvena Storm Scholarship Foundation.”
