Professor Yasuyuki Shimizu is a leading scientist in the field of computational modeling of river flow and morphology. His main area of interest is computational fluid dynamics and sediment transport, a field in which he has worked for more than two decades. He is affiliated with the Hydraulic Research Laboratory (HRL) within the Graduate School of Engineering at Hokkaido University, where he has developed most of the numerical models employed by the HRL group.
Julian Hunt has been a Professor at University College London, since 1999. Formerly he was at the University of Cambridge where he was Professor of Fluid Mechanics. He holds multiple visiting professor and director positions, including the role of Visiting Professor at Arizona State University. In his research, he has developed new approaches to modeling turbulence, atmospheric flows around buildings and over mountains, and the dispersion of environmental pollution. He is chairman of Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants Ltd., which he helped found in 1986.
Deborah Ayodele: "The Global Land Grab- A Perpetuation of the Climate Crisis"
Yan-ting (Vicky) Liau: "Testing environmental stratification and image segmentation for improving accuracies of tree species identifications in mixed forests"
Joanna Merson: "Communication of Nitrogen Removal Rates for a Watershed Management Spatial Decision Support System"
Andrew Ruegg: "Fire Frequency in Southern California: A Preliminary Analysis at the Census Tract Level"
Keith C. Clarke is a research cartographer and professor. He did his undergraduate work at Middlesex Polytechnic, in London, England, and earned M.A. and Ph. D. degrees from the University of Michigan Dr. Clarke joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1996, and since 1998 has served as the Santa Barbara Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. His most recent research has been on environmental simulation modeling, on modeling urban growth using cellular automata, on terrain mapping and analysis, and on the history of the CORONA remote sensing program.
Dr. Clarke is the former North American Editor of the International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, and is series editor for the Prentice Hall Series in Geographic Information Science. He is the author of the textbooks, Analytical and Computer Cartography (Prentice Hall, 1995), Getting Started with GIS (1997) and about eighty book chapters, journal articles, and papersin the fields of cartography, remote sensing, and geographic information systems. In 1990 and 1991 Dr. Clarke was a NASA /American Society for Engineering Education Fellow at Stanford University, and in 1992 served as Science Advisor to the Office of Research, National Mapping Division of the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. In 2005, he received the John Wesley Powell Award, the U.S. Geological Survey’s highest award for achievement, in recognition of his significant contributions to advancement of the organization’s mission.
Most books on cartography start by showing what is purported to be the worlds oldest map, be it a Babylonian clay tablet, or a Roman city model. I'll examine this question from a new viewpoint. First, what are the current candidates for the World Oldest Map, when were they made and what purposes did they serve? Secondly, what actually constitutes a map? Maps serve functions for navigation, sharing spatial memory, hunting, land ownership and for war. Which functions came first and why? Lastly, given that the map record seems to predate writing by several thousands of years, just how prehistoric is cartography?
I argue that humans may have made and used maps in some form at about the time of the exit from Africa, between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago. By 15,000 years BP the human diffusion was complete, and anatomically modern humans lived on every continent except Antarctica, even on isolated Pacific islands. It is possible that the simple map was the secret weapon that allowed humans to populate the planet, making spatial reasoning a vital part of the human DNA.
Dr. Luke is a social demographer whose research focuses on the role that social relationships play in shaping health and development outcomes in developing countries. In particular, she studies the exchange of resources within familial relationships, including bargaining between spouses over the allocation of household resources in India and the exchange of psychosocial and economic support between migrant children and their families of origin in Kenya. With respect to nonfamilial relationships, she examines the exchange of money and gifts within nonmarital sexual partnerships (often referred to as “transactional sex”) in sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Luke’s recent work concerns important health issues, such as sexual behavior and HIV risk, marital violence, son preference, and child nutrition.
Dr. Luke’s research is interdisciplinary, incorporating theoretical and methodological insights from sociology, economics, anthropology, and public health. She has designed and directed several large-scale surveys as well as conducted qualitative studies in Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia, India, and Vietnam. In support of her research, Dr. Luke has received grants from the National Institutes of Health, the World Bank, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Dr. Luke’s research appears in American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Population and Development Review,Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Development Economics, Studies in Family Planning, and Violence Against Women among other journals and edited volumes.
Trained in planning and architecture, Ann Forsyth works mainly on the social aspects of physical planning and urban development. The big issue behind her research and practice is how to make more sustainable and healthy cities. Forsyth's contributions have been to analyze the success of planned alternatives to sprawl, particularly exploring the tensions between social and ecological values in urban design.
Several issues prove to be the most difficult to deal with in planning better places and provide a focus for some of her more detailed investigations: suburban design, walkability, affordable housing, social diversity, and appropriate green space. In doing this work she has created a number of tools and methods in planning—an urban design inventory, GIS protocols, health impact assessments, and participatory planning techniques. Forsyth is also a reflective practitioner/theorist and has created several new ways of understanding social and intellectual diversity in planning and design. Her education includes a B.Sc. in architecture from the University of Sydney, M.A. in urban planning and Ph.D. in city and regional planning from Cornell.
