Post date: Mar 17, 2016 7:19:51 PM
Robert Chen, CIESIN director, has been elected as a Councilor of the American Geographical Society. He was also appointed as one of three co-chairs of the Thematic Network on Sustainable Development Data of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UNSDSN).
CIESIN signed on as an Anchor Partner in the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, which was launched in September 2015.
Marc Levy, CIESIN deputy director, has begun serving as one of two co-chairs of the North American Regional Assessment for the sixth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-6) being developed by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP).
Environmental geographer Pinki Mondal joined CIESIN’s Science Applications Division in September 2015 as a senior research associate. Previously a postdoctoral research scientist in the DeFries Lab at Columbia's Department of Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology, Mondal has a PhD in land change science from the University of Florida. With Prof. Ruth DeFries she is leading an interdisciplinary team of geographers, nutritionists, and economists to examine the diets of small farmers with a variety of income levels in India.
Senior research associate and medical geographer Meredith Golden retired in February 2016 after more than 35 years in the environmental health field. Golden was principal investigator of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Columbia Superfund Research Program, leading the interdisciplinary Research Translation Core and coordinating development of the National Priorities List Superfund Footprint Mapper, a decision-making tool for researchers, regulators, and community partners.
Erin Doxsey-Whitfield, geographic information specialist, left CIESIN in February 2016 to pursue other opportunities in Edmonton, Alberta. She was a key member of the Geospatial Applications Division team developing version four of the Gridded Population of the World data collection.
At the end of his five-month visit in February 2016, Bogdan-Mihai Cîrlugea of l’École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausannne (EPFL) in Switzerland gave a presentation on his masters thesis work validating the OpenStreetMap roads data for integration into the gROADS v1 data set available via the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN.
Other CIESIN visitors include:
Douglas Sathler, who is researching issues related to migration and environment, and cities and climate change. Sathler is a professor with the Institute of Humanities at Brazil’s Universidade Federal dos Vales do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri, and earned his PhD in demography from the Center for Development and Regional Planning (CEDEPLAR) of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
Saleem Khan, Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Scholar, who is at CIESIN for a year to conduct research on communicating the risks of sea level rise and engaging urban stakeholders in framing community-based adaptation strategies. Khan received his PhD in climate change sciences from the Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation Research, Anna University, in Chennai, India.
Dan Wu, a doctoral student in land resource management at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, who is studying non-point source pollution and economic models for pollution reduction. Wu has a masters in management from Zhejiang University.