On November 3, Doug Stow, Professor and Joint Doctoral Program Adviser for the Department of Geography at San Diego State University, announced that Geography graduate student Chris Lippitt was one of 179 applicants from the entire State University to receive an Inamori Fellowship:
“I am pleased to announce that Chris Lippitt has been selected to receive an Inamori Fellowship for 2009-10 from San Diego State University. The award is for $5,000. Competition for Inamori Fellowships in this inaugural year was intense. There were 179 applicants representing master’s and doctoral candidates from every college of SDSU. The review committee pared the applicant list to 30 finalists, and met this morning to discuss and select the ten recipients. (We wanted to get this announcement out right away, so that it was too late to change their minds.) Dr. Kazuo Inamori, founder of Kyocera, has contributed $50,000 that Graduate and Research Affairs will use to make ten $5,000 awards to graduate students at SDSU — Chris being one of the few, the proud, the…. Congratulations, Chris!!!”
Chris has a BA in Geography and an MA in Geographic Information Science from Clark University, and his areas of interest include Remote Sensing, Ecological Modeling, and Spatial Analysis. He was admitted to the Joint Doctoral Program in Fall 2006, and his PhD committee consists of Doug Stow and Ming Tsou from SDSU and Keith Clarke, Dar Roberts, and Mike Goodchild from UCSB.
The UCSB Department of Geography’s joint PhD program with the Department of Geography at San Diego State University is distinctive in that it brings together two outstanding departments that complement each other. California State Universities do not offer stand-alone doctoral programs. The joint doctorate program thereby provides mutual benefits for two of the strongest research-oriented Geography departments in the US, insofar as it increases SDSU’s attractiveness to students by permitting them to pursue a doctorate, and, in turn, allows UCSB to increase its exposure to a more diverse set of gifted students. SDSU students spend a minimum of one year on each campus and normally start and finish their work at SDSU. For more about the joint program, see the September 29, 2009, news article.
