Fall Semester With Interim Chair Chris Justice
September 2024
Message From the Chair
After three years, I had forgotten how much work being a Department Chair really is, so I agreed to be Acting Chair for the fall semester. After just a couple of months, it has become clear to me that the workload has increased, with new responsibilities coming down to the department head. I was also concerned that, with the retirement of Vivre Bell, things would fall apart. But I shouldn’t have worried, as Vicky Berry, who replaced Vivre as our Director of Administrative Services (DAS), has stepped seamlessly into that role, and all our administrative staff are doing a truly outstanding job of managing the ever-increasing workload of a growing department.
Over the summer, the pace didn’t let up, as we hired three Assistant Research Professors, three Postdocs, three Senior Faculty Specialists, one Faculty Specialist and a Financial Research Coordinator. We have a search underway this fall for two new faculty members to fill major gaps in our academic program. Our faculty were successful with 11 research proposals, including Ph.D. student Paromita Basak, who was awarded a NASA FINESST Fellowship. This is especially impressive given the increasing competition for external funding. Our faculty continue to be recognized: Matthew Hansen received the USGS/NASA Pecora Award; Alyssa Whitcraft received the Provost’s PTK Excellence in Research Award; Catherine Nakalembe won the $1M Al-Sumait Prize for African Development, a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship and the BSOS Early Career Impact Award; Bell received the Campus Staff MVP Impact Award; and Kathleen Stewart is serving as the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science President-Elect.
We are now into the fall semester, with a new cohort of graduate students settling in and our undergraduate classes well underway. We continue to look into ways to grow our academic program and create new classes that appeal to our students and attract geography majors. Our professional Master’s Programs, with an emphasis on Geographical Information Systems continue to evolve to meet the demands of new geospatial technologies in the workplace. The department remains physically split between LeFrak Hall and our new River Road facility in the Discovery District. Due to our continued growth, the space we once thought ample is now filled up. We look forward to a time when we can reunite the department in a new building on campus, and happily, that appears to be in the planning stage.
After a productive summer and a busy start to the semester, we are looking forward to a successful fall, which is a great season to be in College Park.
Chris Justice
GEOG Interim Chair and Distinguished University Professor
Published on Wed, 10/09/2024 - 15:20