GIS Summer Fellows Selected

GIS Summer Fellows Selected

Nine Columbia graduate students will participate in a new summer program in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The students, selected this spring in a campus-wide competition, will take part in an intensive 2-month practicum, pursuing their own research and developing new resources for spatial research and teaching in their departments.

The 2005 fellows are:

• Heather Atherton (Anthropology)
  Faculty Sponsor: Nan Rothschild
• Emily Bernstein (Sociology)
  Faculty Sponsor: Dana Fisher
• Francesco Brindisi (Economics)
  Faculty Sponsor: Brendan O'Flaherty
• Jeronimo Cortina (Political Science)
  Faculty Sponsors: Andrew Nathan and Andrew Gelman
• Laura Forlano (Journalism)
  Faculty Sponsor: David Klatell
• Amanda Geller (Social Work)
  Faculty Sponsor: Julien Teitler
• Cynthia Golembeski (Public Health)
  Faculty Sponsor: Mindy Fullilove
• Michelle McEwen (GSAPP)
  Faculty Sponsors: Yolanda Daniels and Laura Kurgan
• Heather Schwartz (Teachers College)
  Faculty Sponsor: Jeffrey Henig

Led by instructors Douglas Miller (ISERP), Mark Becker (CIESIN), and Ryan Kelsey (CCNMTL), each GIS Summer Fellow will develop and teach a GIS/spatial module within a course in his or her own department. They will canvass spatial research in their departments and disciplines, highlighting cutting-edge applications for GIS in a spatial bibliography. The program will also promote interdisciplinary exchange and advanced GIS training, enriching students' own research projects.

The mini-curriculums will introduce GIS applications to urban economists, journalists, public health professionals, education researchers, and those who study of political phenomena, among others. One GIS module will analyze data pertaining to political participation in the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign. Another project aims to use GIS to better map the political and legislative foundations of urban segregation through time.

The GIS Summer Fellows program is the centerpiece of a two-year initiative to improve GIS infrastructure and integrate spatial perspectives into the social sciences at Columbia. Led by Elliott Sclar and funded by Columbia's Academic Quality Fund, a cross-campus working group has launched a new GIS website and is sponsoring a number of activities designed to bring spatial analysis into the mainstream of the social sciences at Columbia.

Partners in this initiative include the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), and Columbia's Information and Library Sciences, including the Lehman Social Sciences Library, Academic Information Systems (AcIS), the Electronic Data Service (EDS), and the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL).

For more information, visit the Geographic Information Systems website.

See Also

• Geographic Information Systems
• Newsletter article: New Columbia GIS Initiative Funded