When Dr. Stuart Sweeney was informed that he had been promoted to Associate Professor, he promptly sent out an email to everyone in the department saying, “having blown my conch shell in celebration, I’m now reclining in my seat thinking of getting a coffee. My sincerest thanks to all of you, friends, family, colleagues, staff, and students, who have supported me.”
Stuart is perhaps best known for teaching what was possibly the world’s first ever “Geography of Surfing” class in Spring 2004, a class that was filled (indeed, overfilled) in record time, resulted in a series of local TV and newspaper stories, and, as Keith Clarke pointed out in his Letter from the Chair this March, was “at the forefront in our outreach for more undergraduate majors.”Stuart is currently midway through the second offering of the class, with 257 students enrolled. As he points out, “my motivation for offering the course is to teach some of the ideas central to geography in a context that will connect strongly with the cultural milieu of the students. After all, most of the young people I teach at UCSB grew up in, or near, beach cities of California. I’m hoping that the course connects on a deep level with the students, allowing them to see the world around them through the lens of geography.”
Stuart’s diverse research interests include regional modeling and planning, human settlement and migration, industry location analysis, spatial statistics, enrollment forecasting, school choice, and geography education. His currently funded research is on school choice in the Santa Barbara Elementary School District ($24,988 UCSB Academic Senate, Pearl Chase Funds; co-PI Raymond Wong) and on intra-metropolitan industry location ($100,000 National Science Foundation; co-PI Phaedon Kyriakidis). He is also the Chair of the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences Graduate Emphasis at UCSB. More than one good reason to blow his own horn!
