Speaker: Dr. Jason Blackburn
Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of Florida
Thursday, January 30, 2020
2:50-3:50 PM (Period 8)
Turlington Hall Room 3018
University of Florida
All are welcome to attend.
By default, geographers are travelers and our collaborations span the globe. This is especially true at the University of Florida, where geography faculty, research staff, students, and postdocs are engaged in research and teaching on nearly all continents. As part of this, we need tools to keep us connected. Cloud-based data sharing, communication, and partnership are advancing rapidly, and becoming truly seamless, across platforms and devices. At the same time, there is increasing access to stable and reasonable bandwidth internet to access these tools, including even some remote areas. While internet-based tools are not the only solution to collaboration, nor do they fully replace travel for in-person field/site/lab visits, tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams/One Drive, and a variety of social media and web-based telecom apps are bringing our partnerships together in real or near real time. This talk will illustrate how the Spatial Epidemiology & Ecology Research Lab is capitalizing on collaboration tools to maintain active research and training programs across the continents from monitoring saiga antelope movements in Kazakhstan to tracing human anthrax in Vietnam – and connecting a diverse and interdisciplinary team across GIS and microbiology labs on right here on campus.