UI graduate student Shane Hubbard played an essential role in aiding both FEMA and the Red Cross in planning for the Johnson County Flood Recovery. Hubbard, along with FEMA and Johnson County Emergency Management and Homeland Security, used Hazus-MH to map flood routes and their effect on establishments. With Hubbard's help FEMA was able to better plan for recovery.
The full article is available here.
David Bennett and Kathleen Stewart have recently been awarded a two-year research grant from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on ‘Simulating Spatiotemporal Interactions of Mobile Entities’
This research project will investigate how entities that are mobile, adaptive, and intelligent learn to navigate and adapt to landscapes that include risk or opportunity including, for example, territory that is rapidly changing with respect to a hazardous condition. One goal of this work is to understand how complex spatiotemporal dynamics can be modeled, represented, and understood. Monte Carlo simulations using agent-based technologies are applied to generate a typology of spatiotemporal interactions for mobile entities and a metasystem will be developed to explore the causal relationships that drive these interactions.
Shane Hubbard, a PhD student in the Department of Geography played an important role during the massive flooding of June 2008 by working with Johnson County Emergency Management and Homeland Security officials to assess flooding impacts using HAZUS-MH software and modeling tools. Shane worked with Johnson County officials to provide critical flood impact assessments and flood boundary maps during the height of the flood event.
See this link for more information on Shane's efforts and the use of HAZUS-MH for emergency response applications. Shane is a PhD student working with Dr. Kathleen Stewart on modeling spatiotemporal dynamics.
Faculty and graduate students contributed to four articles in a recent issue examining the role of models in land use science. Vineet Yadav was the lead author examining issues related to incorporating ecosystem function into agent-based models. George Malanson and Marc Linderman were co-authors of articles that examined complexity, cross-site comparisons, and agent-based modeling of household dynamics.
"Land use science is now at a crucial juncture in its maturation process. Much has been learned, but the array of factors influencing land use change, the diversity of sites chosen for case studies, and the variety of modeling approaches used by the various case study teams have all combined to make two of the hallmarks of science, generalization and validation, difficult within land use science. This introduction and the four papers in this themed issue grew out of two workshops which were part of a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) ‘Roadmap’ project. The general idea behind the NIH Roadmap initiative was to stimulate scientific advances by bringing together diverse disciplines to tackle a common, multi-disciplinary scientific problem."
at IIT-Madras. He has also received the Center for Global and Environmental Research Graduate Student Travel Award.
May 2008 - UI Geography Professor Rex Honey named first-ever
"Faculty Mentor of the Year" by International Programs
UI Cultural Geography Professor Dr. Rex Honey has been named the first-ever "Faculty Mentor of the Year" by International Programs.
"Dr. Honey was chosen for this award because of his unwavering support for, and outstanding service to, International Studies and all of our students," said Deowning A. Thomas, the Associate Dean of International Programs.
Dr. Marc Armstrong, the Chair of the UI Department of Geography and interim Chair of the UI Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, presented the first Waldo Tobler Distinguished Lecture in Geographic Information Science at the 2008 AAG Meeting in Boston in April 15-19. The title of his lecture was "Connecting Cyberinfrastructure and Geographic Information Science."
Dr. Stewart Hornsby is co-editor of Understanding Dynamics of Geographic Domains, published in April 2008 by CRC Press. This book contains eleven chapters by a multi-disciplinary group of authors on topics relating to modeling geographic dynamics and GIScience. This book is a partner to an earlier publication co-authored by Kathleen Stewart and May Yuan on Computation and Visualization for Understanding Dynamics in Geographic Domains: A Research Agenda, which may be purchased line from Amazon by clicking here or from CRC Press by clicking
Social entrepreneurs are described as “new heroes,” people who often work against the odds to find solutions where others only see problems (e.g. poverty and unemployment, environmental problems, lack of infrastructure). Often (but not always) working in developing countries, social entrepreneurs observe that part of society is stuck, and find ways to get it unstuck.
Over winter break Professors R. Rajagopal and Ed Brands led a team of 23 Iowans for a 3-week period to Tamil Nadu, India to visit, participate with, and learn directly from social entrepreneurs in eight organizations that employ a diverse variety of techniques to address social problems such as child labor, unemployment, poverty, healthcare for the poor, illiteracy, community waste management, and schools for the handicapped. The group of students included geography, engineering, nursing, business, social work, international studies/relations, public health, MBA, and art majors.
Last year, Professors Rajagopal and Brands' class earned rave reviews in BizEd Magazine, where their program was compared to similar ones at Harvard and LeHigh Universities. The BizEd article, Making a Major Impact with Microfinance, BizEd Magazine. May/June 2007, is available online here.
Look for information on an exciting return lecture and public event discussing their trip in this section soon. In the meantime, academia and media personnel, as well as other interested parties, may contact Dr. Rajagopal or Dr. Brands at r-rajagopal@uiowa.edu or edwin-brands@uiowa.edu.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) intends to enter into negotiations with The University of Iowa for work relating to spatial sampling of PM coarse particles for megacities. The EPA is interested in the method of optimal spatial sampling design developed by Dr. Naresh Kumar, and the passive sampler with new shelter designed by Dr. Thomas Peters and Darrin Ott, Dr. Kumar’s collaborators in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, College of Public Health. The EPA’s intent to enter into negotiation with The University of Iowa is available online here:
Professor Naresh Kumar is also serving on the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) PAR-07-345 review panel. It is a new mechanism for time-sensitive research opportunities. Details are available here: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PAR-07-345.html
Dr. Kumar also recently received a seed grant from the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination (CHEEC) to develop indirect methods of estimating indoor and outdoor air quality in Iowa City area. The grant amount is $30,000. The UI press release may be read here.
