学为人师, 行为世范 

Learn, so as to instruct others; Act, to serve as example to all. 

Graduate Students

Yuzhou Chen is a PhD candidate in Geography, Environmental Science, and Policy at USF. He obtained his BS in Urban Planning at Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) and earned his MS in Urban and Regional Planning at USF. He is interested in applying GIS and spatial analysis to detect urban changes, identify city network structure, evaluate urban shrinkage, and promote smart and sustainable cities. His dissertation topic is “Proposing Coordinated Urban Development Strategies for Cities Networked by Spatial Flows”, in which he aims to propose coordinated development strategies for a group of interconnected cities based on detecting urban changes at a fine spatiotemporal resolution. In his spare time, he likes playing ping-pong, watching movies, and playing videogames.

Lauren Carter, Ph.D., graduated in Summer 2023. After completing her BS and MS in atmospheric sciences and applied meteorology, she switched fields to geography to explore the human impact of weather and climate. She is interested in applying GIS and spatial analysis to evaluate how disasters such as hurricanes and pandemics affect socioeconomically challenged communities, especially on people’s migration and travel behaviors. Her dissertation topic was “Evaluating Puerto Rican’s Mobility Patterns: Demography, Social Vulnerability, and Dual-Disaster Scenarios”. In her spare time, she enjoys watching sci-fi movies, reading dystopian novels, and playing fantasy videogames.

Chuang Yin earned his Master of Geography at USF in 2023. After completing his bachelor’s degree in Geography, he chose to further study and explore the relationships between human and environments in the master program. He is interested in applying GIS to solve problems of modern transportation systems, such as quantifying the impact of electric vehicles on the traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. His thesis topic was “Spatial Mismatch Between Electric Vehicles and Charging Stations in Florida”. In his spare time, he likes playing table tennis, watching movies and series, and traveling to different places.

Future Students: send me your CV via email and briefly state why you are interested.

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is to create a network of effective knowledge sharing both inside and outside the classroom, while tailoring my teaching style to enhance students' professional development, regardless of their diverse disciplinary or cultural backgrounds. I believe the primary goal of a teacher is to effectively share knowledge with students and enable their independent learning late in life. To achieve this goal, I create a network to facilitate the knowledge flow between me and students. Given that geography is such an inclusive discipline where “everything is related to everything else”, an approach that I found to work extraordinarily well is to relate course contents to the latest news, local stories, and my own research experiences. On the other hand, I believe the flow of knowledge sharing is not only from the instructor to students, but multi-directional among students as well. This is the reason that I adopt active learning strategies to arouse students’ interest in seeking knowledge and to encourage their communication and collaboration. Each of my classes incorporates various teaching activities including lectures, group discussions, classroom games, hands-on practices, and student presentations.

Courses

@ University of South Florida (2018 - Present)

@ University of Southern California (2017-2018)

@ UNC-Charlotte (2012-2017)