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Chair’s Corner

Chair’s Corner: Spring 2020

Gators take the world!

It has been an exciting time for our Department as we have hired 8 new faculty in the past 2 years, and have grown to a faculty base of 23 full time faculty appointments. This is larger than we have ever been in our history and has allowed us to expand our course offerings, build on our focus areas, increase our research expenditures as well as improve our physical space. We recently opened The Poehling Grad Lab in Geospatial Sciences – our new graduate lab – which is an amazing space for our graduate students, incorporating two computer labs, a conference room and presentation area and a lounge with outdoor deck and seating. Our inaugural event in this space occurred in February 2020 – where we hosted the opening ceremony for the Florida Society of Geographers Annual Meeting.

Stephen Mullens, Dr. Yujie Hu, Dr. Katy Serafin, Dr. Esther Mullens, Dr. Kevin Ash, Dr. Olivier Walther, Dr. Gaby Hamerlinck, Dr. Michael Norris – new faculty at the 2020 Faculty Retreat

The last two years alone saw eight new faculty hires. We were very luck to hire:

  1. Stephen Mullens – Meteorology and Communication Science
  2. Dr. Yujie Hu – Spatial Networks
  3. Dr. Katy Serafin – Environmental Change/Sustainability/Climate Change
  4. Dr. Esther Mullens – Meteorology and Climatology
  5. Dr. Kevin Ash – Environmental Hazards and Risk Communication
  6. Dr. Olivier Walther – Economic /Political Geography with Africa focus
  7. Dr. Gaby Hamerlinck – Medical Geography
  8. Dr. Michael Norris – Medical Geography
CHOMP CHOMP!

Highlights from the past academic year are:

  • Faculty submitted a total of 43 research grants, to agencies such as NSF, NIH, NOAA, NAS, and DTRA, requesting over $28 million
  • Faculty currently have 47 funded research grants totaling over $33 million.
  • Most of these are highly collaborative, interdisciplinary, and international in focus.
  • Faculty published a total of 83 peer reviewed articles and 17 non peer-reviewed
  • Dr. Matyas was selected CLAS Teacher of the Year
  • Dr. Mossa is President of SEDAAG (the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers) and of FSG (Florida Society of Geography) and Gainesville will be hosted the 2020 Annual Meeting
    Undergraduate majors increased for the 4th consecutive year
  • We developed a new UFO (UF Online) degree in Geosciences
  • We are developing a new degree in ‘Geographical Sciences and Sustainability’
  • We taught over 30% more undergraduate students in our courses
  • We are the fifth ranked department in term of research funding raised, listed behind units more than double our size [Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Psychology)

November 2019, we held our Third Annual Evening of Excellence in Geography Event, where we presented more awards to graduates than in any previous year, due to in part to new and exciting donations from our Alumni. Our certificate programs in Geospatial Analysis & Techniques, Climatology and Meteorology and Medical Geography in Global Health continue to expand. We are adding new focus areas to build on the strengths of our existing faculty and numerous new hires in:

  • Catastrophes, Conservation & Conflict
  • GeoPolitics and the Global Economy
  • Places, Networks and Flows
  • Sustainability and Environmental Change

Geography is an exciting place for growth right now, with our undergraduates receiving excellent jobs across numerous fields, such as: Geospatial Analyst, FEMA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, GIS Analyst, Foreign Service, Urban Planning, Environmental Consultant, Broadcast Meteorologist, to name but a few. UF Geography is going places!

To keep in touch you can follow the Department on Facebook (including the UF Geography Club and UF Geography Alumni), Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, and as always you can email us as we would love to hear from you.

Sincerely
Dr. Jane Southworth
Chair