2026-05-07 - The Illinois Global Institute has selected two graduate students from the Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science to receive research awards and language fellowships.Graduate Summer Research Awards (summer 2026)Sayak Roy, India. “Emergent Networks of Self-Organization:...
2026-04-30 - What happens at the end of science? Philosophy?It is the kind of question that can pause a conversation. Not because science fails, and not because philosophy is waiting at the edge of the laboratory to correct it, but because every discipline, if you follow it far enough, begins to run into its own foundations. What counts as truth? What can be known? What is real? What do numbers describe, and...
2026-03-30 - Some Arctic regions regain their “greenness” within a decade of a sudden permafrost collapse, while others can take a century or more to recover, researchers report in a new study. The difference is directly related to each site’s gross primary productivity, a measure of its photosynthetic capacity, the researchers discovered. This finding will allow scientists to accurately predict how long it...
2026-03-23 - Jordan McAlister is a human geographer with interests in the built environment, historical geography, and historic preservation. A native of Texas, he has long taken an interest in the cultural and regional geographies of North America, including the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Prairie Provinces, the American...
2026-03-11 - A new study using multidecade satellite imagery and face-to-face human interviews tracked the environmental and societal impacts of gravel mining in the Lubha River, Northeast Bangladesh. The researchers found that the river had recovered its natural shape within just four years after gravel mining stopped. However, the local economy did not bounce back nearly as quickly.The study, published in...
2026-02-17 - CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — City development is increasingly associated with creating “smart cities” that use technology for managing city services, home construction and attracting resources. But those strategies come with negative consequences to a city’s poor residents, said David Wilson, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign...
2025-12-09 - After more than a decade of collaborative work, a significant new book advancing the science of water and society has been published with the involvement of Murugesu Sivapalan, professor of geography & geographic information science. Sivapalan served on—and co-chaired—the editorial advisory board for...
2025-10-29 - In a discipline devoted to spaces, one of the most significant transformations came recently in Davenport Hall where a little-used room was converted to a new, state-of-the art geospatial laboratory thanks in large part to a generous donation from Candace Penn (BS, ’72, geography; MPA, ’94, Auburn University Graduate Air War College, Maxwell AFB,...
2025-09-10 - Gyudae “GD” Kim never planned on becoming a geographer. Nearly 20 years ago, he was serving his mandatory military service in South Korea when a sudden injury left him paralyzed. At the time, he wasn’t considering graduate school, let alone an academic career. He was just trying to figure out how to move forward.That turning...
2025-09-01 - As a Roepke Research Scholar last fall, I helped Dr. Julie Cidell investigate railyard redevelopment in Chicago. Starting from a 1915 Chicago Association of Commerce report, I used Google Maps and basic georeferencing strategies to locate and gather modern-day imagery of railyards detailed in the report and determine their current usage. Had a particular railyard been decommissioned and...
2025-09-01 - I started playing Sim City at age six on my parents’ new personal computer, which was my introduction to urban planning and probably led me to become a transportation planner. When I first began studying geography at Illinois, I was most interested in how and why cities function in the various ways that they do. I ended up pursuing a master’s degree in urban planning at UIC after completing my BA...
2025-09-01 - Aisling Reynolds-Feighan graduated from University College, Dublin (UCD) with a BA in economics and geography in 1985. She earned an MA in economics the following year and then joined our PhD program in Fall 1987. As part of her doctoral research, I traveled to Houston with Aisling to interview Continental Airlines in hopes that they would share data about the aircraft allocated to their origin-...- 2025-09-01 - Nikolai Alvarado Nikolai Alvarado presented a paper entitled Urban Informality, Migration, and Waste: Spatio-Corporeal Cartographies of Environmental Oppression at the second annual UIC Encounter on Migration and Indigenous People last fall. He was also awarded a Humanities Research Institute (HRI) 2025 Faculty Summer Fellowship for his proposal entitled: Counter-Cartographies...
2025-08-27 - How did you decide to become a geographer?I started off as an environmental science major at Wuhan University in China. During my first year, I took electives in programming and discovered how much I enjoyed it. GIS was our sister program at the time and I learned that many GIS faculty members were using programming in their work, and applying it to study critical social and...
2025-08-13 - Master's and PhD applications are due December 15th.