Please visit our calendar for upcoming talks and events.
Each Friday afternoon, prominent scholars from across the discipline and our own faculty and PhD students present and discuss their research with the GGIS community. Colloquium is held at 3:00 p.m. and is free and open to the campus community, unless otherwise noted.
~ Geography & GIS Distinguished Alumni Colloquium
* Annual Geography Graduate Student Association (GGSA) Invited Speaker
~Previous Colloquia~
Fall 2022
The Power to Stay: Climate, Cocoa, and the Politics of Displacement
Sean Kennedy, California Strategic Growth Council/Department of Urban Planning, UIUC
Geospatial Analysis of Bull Elephant Movements Towards Mitigating Human-Elephant Conflict in the Zambezi River Region of Southern Africa
Dr. Marguerite Madden, University of Georgia
Why is sustainable mobility so hard? Some observations on the paths forward
Dr. Harvey J. Miller, The Ohio State University
Multiscale modeling for engineering plants
Dr. Megan Matthews, Civil & Environmental Engineering UIUC
Urban Food Environment Research: How time, movement, and (sometimes) big data are transforming the study of food shopping in cities
~Dr. Michael J. Widener, University of Toronto - St. George
An Integrated CyberGIS and Machine Learning Framework for Fine-scale and Real-time Understanding of Urban Heat Dynamics
Fangzheng Lyu, GGIS PhD Student
Spring 2022
Governing the Urban in China and India
Dr. Xuefei Ren, Michigan State University
Turbulent Streams: The Making of Japan’s Modern River Regime
Dr. Roderick Wilson, Department of History & East Asian Languages and Cultures, UIUC
An Urban Theory in the Flesh: Latinx Struggles for Social Justice in the City
Dr. Madelaine Cahuas, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
The Prosthetics of Infrastructure: Invisible Bodies, Devalued Labor and the Everyday Circulation of Water in Delhi
Dr. Yaffa Truelove, University of Colorado at Boulder
Sustainability of the global sand system in the Anthropocene
Dr. Aurora Torres, UCLouvain, Belgium
Drainage Integration and Transverse Drainage Development: From Bathtub to Base Level
Dr. Phil Larson, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Building Space, Building Wealth: Residential Space Additions and the Transformation of Low-rise Housing in Toronto
Dr. Michelle Buckley, University of Toronto Scarborough
Space-time Clustering of COVID-19: An Early Career Research Trajectory During the Pandemic
*Dr. Alexander Hohl, University of Utah
Legacy phosphorus: a blind spot in P biogeochemistry?
Dr. Andrew Margenot, Crop Sciences, UIUC
Exploring the Relationship Between Society and Flooding Risk with Socio-Environmental Models: Working Hypotheses for Advancing the Field
Dr. James Knighton, University of Connecticut
Fall 2021
Integrated Segregation, Dress Codes and Discrimination in Urban Nightlife
Dr. Reuben A. Buford May, Florian Znaniecki Professorial Scholar & Professor of Sociology, UIUC
Mapping for Resilience: Building Geographic Approaches for Equitable Futures
Dr. Patricia Solis, Executive Director, Knowledge Exchange for Resilience, ASU
Colonial Policy, Social Trust, and Economic Resilience: The Long-term Impacts of Imperial Russian Settlement in Southern Kazakhstan
Dr. Nora Webb Williams, Department of Political Science, UIUC
Who owns affordable housing? The rise of real estate monopolies and what to do about it
Dr. Renee Tapp, Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, UIC
Notes on an Equitable Covid-19 Recovery
Dr. Andrew Greenlee, Urban & Regional Planning, UIUC
Redistribution of Soil Organic Carbon in Low-gradient Systems Resulting from Interplay of Aggregate Dynamics and Erosion
Dr. Shengnan Zhou, Department of Crop Sciences, UIUC
Schelling, Social Distance and Sorting
~Dr. William A. V. Clark, University of California, Los Angeles
Interdisciplinary Critical Geographies of Water: social power and hydrological flows in the Anthropocene
Dr. Maria Rusca, Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Sweden
Automated Geospatial Analysis of Watershed Characteristics to Evaluate Reservoir Sedimentation
Dr. Amanda Cox, Civil Engineering, Saint Louis University
Terrestrial Ecological Applications of Imaging Spectrometry
Dr. Dar Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara
Indian Automobility and Auto-Space in Urban India: Whose Road is it Anyway?
Dr. Tarini Bedi, Anthropology, UIC
Spring 2021
Human-Environment Interactions in Island Ecosystems: Challenges to Sustainability in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador
Dr. Stephen J. Walsh, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Intersections of Science, Technology, and Society in Hopkins Village, Belize
*Dr. Timothy Hawthorne, University of Central Florida
Where are the Community Water Systems? A Systematic Review of Geospatial Representation of United States Drinking Community Water System Service Areas
Dr. Yolanda McDonald, Vanderbilt University
Impact of Air Pollution and Climate Change on Anthropometric Outcomes Among Children in Africa
Dr. Kevin M. Mwenda, Brown University
Rivers of Power: How An Ancient Force Rules Us Still
Dr. Laurence Smith, John Atwater & Diana Nelson Chair of Environmental Studies, Brown University
Multi-faceted Measurements of Job Access Inequality for Transit-based Workers
Dong Liu, PhD Candidate
Dynamics of anabranching rivers juxtaposed within lowland meandering rivers in intensively managed landscapes
Tanya Shukla, PhD Student
Geoexpression: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Geographic Process Concurrency
Austin Davis, PhD Student
Seeking the Urban Resilience Fix: Balancing Economic Growth, Climate Change, and Social Justice in Flagstaff, Arizona
Nina Roberts, PhD Student
Network Dual K Function: Exact Statistical Methods for Analyzing Co-location on Street Networks and Applications to Living Environment Assessment
Wataru Morioka, PhD Student
Fall 2020
Recent Global Land Surface Greening and Its Implications for Global Carbon Cycle
Dr. Conghe Song, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Creative Destruction, Pentecostalism, and the Spectacle of Ghana’s National Cathedral
Dr. Kwame Adovor Tsikudo, Geography & GIS Visiting Professor
#twitterrevolution—destabilizing the world, 280 characters at a time
Dr. Dennis Baron, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
WhereCOVID-19: A CyberGIS Approach to Mapping Multi-Scale Spread and Impacts of COVID-19 for Spatial Decision Support
Dr. Shaowen Wang, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Drones for River Monitoring
Dr. James Dietrich, University of Northern Iowa
Examining our changing urban environment: from spatial pattern to sustainable development
Dr. Soe Myint, Arizona State University
New Conceptual Models for Neck Cutoff Dynamics: Capturing the Variability in Natural Meandering Rivers
~Dr. Kory Konsoer, Louisiana State University
Reconfiguring Racial Regimes of Ownership: Vacancy and the Labor of Revitalization on Chicago’s South Side
Rea Zaimi, PhD Candidate
Living in a Paradox of Social Integration and Market Control. The "Urbanization" of the Villas (slums) in the Center-East Areas of Buenos Aires.
Dr. Carolina Sternberg, DePaul University
Migration, health and well-being: investigating the role of neighbourhood contexts in immigrant health and the COVID-19 pandemic
*Dr. Lu Wang, Ryerson University
High-Resolution Spatial and Temporal Evolution of Two-Dimensional Flow Structure at a Small Stream Confluence
Sadia Sabrina, Master's Candidate
What Happens When Alpine Glaciers Retreat? Interacting impacts on hydrology, geomorphology & ecosystems
Dr. Stuart Lane, University of Lausanne (Switzerland)
Spring 2020
Exploring the Nexus Between Knowledge Capital and Social Vulnerability: A Comparative Study on the U.S. and Australian cities
Dr. Sajeda Tuli, Visiting Scholar
Seasonal Food Security in Rainfed India: the Roles of Income Diversity and Women’s Empowerment
Dr. Jennifer Zavaleta, Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences, UIUC
Complexity of Water Resources Management in Turkey
Dr. Hafzullah Aksoy, Geography & GIScience Fulbright Visiting Fellow
The Science, Politics, and Biophysical Outcomes of Dam Removal
Dr. Frank Magilligan, Dartmouth College
Fall 2019
Logistical Borderlands: Infrastructure of Migrant Management
Daniel Gonzalez, PhD Student
Space, Race, and Mobility Justice: Everyday Micro-Politics in South African Public Transport
Dr. Bradley Rink, University of the Western Cape
Highway Protests, Legislative Backlash, and Mobility Justice
Dr. Julie Cidell, Geography & GIS
Data-Intensive Crop Knowledge Discovery in the Era of CyberGIS and Machine Intelligence
Yaping Cai, PhD Candidate
Applying Spatial Analysis to Study Health(Care) Equity: A Study of Audiologist Service Availability & Accessibility in the US
Arrianna Planey, PhD Candidate
CyberGIS-enabled remote sensing data analytics for deep learning of landscape patterns and dynamics
Zewei Xu, PhD Student
How Representative are Indigenous Authorities supported by the Indigenous Amazon REDD+?
Carol Burga Cahuana, PhD Student
Spring 2019
Modeling Nonstationarity in Space and Time
Professor Bo Li, Statistics
Travel Behavior and Transportation Equity in Latino Immigrant Communities
Jesus Barajas, Department of Urban & Regional Planning – UIUC
Listening to Urban Sound: Understanding Human Mobility, Sound Exposure, and Well-Being
Lirong Kou, PhD Student
The Gender of Value: Violence, Care Work and Petty Accumulation in the Urban Informal Economy
*Dr. Vinay Gidwani - University of Minnesota
The Multiple Dimensions of Extensive (Big) Geospatial Data: Retrospect and Prospect
Dr. Marc P. Armstrong, University of Iowa
Data-Intensive Crop Knowledge Discovery in the Era of CyberGIS and Machine Intelligence
Yaping Cai, PhD Student
"Everything around me has skyrocketed”: Using Qualitative GIS to Understand Middle-Income Renters’ Perceptions of Housing Price, Neighborhood Change, and (Im)mobility in New York City
Rebecca Shakespeare, PhD Student
Fall 2018
A Multi-scale Spatial and Political Economic Analysis of Hearing Health Care in the United States
Arrianna Planey, PhD student
Conceptualizing a National Geospatial Software Institute
Dr. Shaowen Wang, Professor of Geography & GIS
Professional Development: Convincing People Your Research Matters
Alexis Thompson, Assistant Dean for Student Success - the Graduate College
Social Accounting in the American Rustbelt: Producing the Uneven Geography of Austerity-Induced Precarity
Melissa Heil, PhD Student
Borehole/Handpump Functionality: a Political Economy Analysis
Dr. Evance Mwathunga,Department of Geography and Earth Sciences Chancellor College, University of Malawi
Integrative Approaches to Advance High-Latitude Ecosystem Patterns, Processes, and Prediction
Dr. Mark Lara, Department of Plant Biology
CyberGIS-Enabled Agent-Based Modeling for City-Scale Traffic Evacuation: A Tale of Complexity, Scalability, and Reproducibility
Dandong Yin, PhD student
Addressing the Uncertain Geographic Context Problem
Jue Wang, PhD Student
Modeling and mapping spatial likelihood of travel modes using GPS trajectories
Kangjae Lee, Informatics/Geography & GIS PhD student
Water Crisis: Need "Imagineering" Not Just Engineering to Solve Water Security Challenges
Dr. Murugesu Sivapalan, Geography & GIS and Civil & Environmental Engineering
Spring 2018
Tracking Changes in Geography Over the Last Century: Evidence from Doctoral Dissertations
Dr. David Kaplan, Kent State University
Data-Intensive Spatial Pattern Discovery Based on Generalized Spatial Point Representations
Yizhao Gao, PhD student
An Applied People’s Geography: Power, Practice, and Property
Dr. Joshua Akers
Commons, Co-ops, and Corporations: Indonesia's 21st Century Land Reform
*Dr. Tania Murray Li, University of Toronto
Social Geographies of Seasonal Labor Migration in Rural Western India
Pronoy Rai, PhD student
Anti-Racism Activism and Geography: Engaging in Local Politics
Dr. Audrey Kobayashi, Queen's University
Transportation, Health, and Social Justice: Lessons from the Distribution of Cycling Infrastructure
Dr. Lindsay Braun, Department of Urban and Regional Planning
Fall 2017
Encircling the Sun: Uneven Gendered Impacts of Solar Development in Rural Gujarat, India
Ryan Stock, PhD student
Understanding the Causal Factors Influencing Residential Mobility and Perceived Housing Affordability for Middle Income Renters
Rebecca Shakespeare, PhD student
Mining Human Activity-Travel Patterns for Constructing a Noise Profile of Chicago
Li Xu, PhD student
Afterlives of Disinvestment: Revitalization and Infra-Structural Labor in Chicago
Rea Zaimi, PhD student