Research
Faculty Research
Thomas Boswell (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1973)
Professor Boswell has research and teaching interests in immigration, world population problems, ethnicity, and housing segregation and discrimination. He taught at the University of Northern Colorado and the University of Florida prior to coming to the University of Miami. He has just finished writing a book entitled Facts About Immigration and Asking "Six Big Questions" for Florida and Miami-Dade County. The research for this work was funded ($138,000) by the Emma Lazarus Fund, the State of Florida's Department of Community Affairs, and the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. He is currently working on research dealing with immigration from the West Indies to the United States and with non-Hispanic white flight from Miami-Dade County.
Douglas O. Fuller (Ph.D., University of Maryland, 1994)
Professor Fuller specializes in remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), land-cover change, and human-environment interactions, especially in Southeast Asia and Africa. He uses imagery from weather satellites to examine inter-annual phenomena associated with weather and climate change. Examples of some of his research projects include mapping desertification (the creation of human-made deserts) in West Africa, fires and deforestation in Indonesia, funded by the World Wide Fund for Nature, and ecoregional planning for The Nature Conservancy in Indonesia. As part of an effort to address problems of vector-borne diseases in urban environments, he has also played a major role in an NIH-funded project to map areas at risk from dengue fever in Costa Rica.
Richard J. Grant (Ph.D., University of Colorado, 1991)
During the fall of 2005, Professor Grant was a visiting researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His current research focuses on three projects:
- The Space Economy of Accra, Ghana. This project involves mapping the economic geography of Accra as a globalizing city. It is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. A book entitled Globalizing City will be published in 2008.
- New Geographies of International Trade.This project focuses on understanding and mapping the increasing complexities and mosaics in international trade.
- The Work and Economy of Slums. This project details and maps the production sites and concentrations of work specializations within different types of slums. This research connects informal economy, slums, and industrial geography.
Laurence S. Kalkstein (Ph.D., Louisiana State University, 1974)
Research Professor Kalkstein is the principal investigator on a number of contracted research projects dealing with the assessment, development, and implementation of heat/health watch-warning systems for major cities worldwide. He has also been involved in the development of various weather indices for use in applied climatological analysis. These include air mass-based synoptic classifications and the development of a relative climatological index, as well as the Heat Stress Index (funded by NOAA/National Climatic Data Center). The Heat Stress Index will be used experimentally by at least 10 NOAA Weather Forecast offices during the summer of 2007. Prof. Kalkstein and his colleagues at the Synoptic Climatology Laboratory have worked on research with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop cool initiatives to lower urban structural temperatures with the hope of saving the lives of people vulnerable to heat stress. He is also working with the EPA to develop a standard set of intervention measures for cities when heat emergencies are declared. He is also a leader on the World Meteorological Association's expert team on extreme weather and human health.
Mazen Labban (Ph.D., Clark University, 2005)
Professor Labban's research focuses on the historical geography of twentieth-century capitalism. His approach is both theoretical and historical, and incorporates critical social theory, the philosophy of space and nature, political economy, and theories of development and imperialism.
Peter O. Muller (Ph.D., Rutgers University, 1971)
Professor Muller is widely recognized for his work on suburbanization in the United States. His primary research interest involves the changing geography of employment within large U.S. metropolitan areas. Jobs are steadily suburbanizing as cities continue their restructuring. It is commonly believed that employment is heavily concentrating in suburban downtowns or "edge cities" but the evidence he has gathered suggests that the dispersion of commercial-office-based activity is the more important force. This has spawned "edgeless cities," which may indicate that suburban sprawl is as pervasive for nonresidential activities as it is for residential decentralization.
Jan Nijman (Ph.D., University of Colorado, 1990)
Professor Nijman received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. His research interests center on world cities, urban studies, globalization, and geopolitics. In 2001, he was elected to serve on the National Geographic Society's prestigious Committee on Research and Exploration, a position he continues to occupy. Currently, Prof. Nijman is serving as principal investigator for the following funded projects:
- The Changing Space Economy Mumbai (Bombay), India. This involves extensive field research and mapping of the changing economic geography this burgeoning megacity. This project is funded by an NSF grant.
- The Geography of Inequality in Mumbai, India. This work concentrates on the changing spatial patterns of economic and social well being across the metropolis, in the wake of market liberalization policies. This project is also funded by an NSF grant.
- Miami's Growth as a World City and Accompanying Social Structure as a Transient City. This research concentrates on the emergence of Miami as a major trading center with strong economic and social connections to Latin America, Canada, and Europe. The study is funded by the Guggenheim Foundation.
Rinku Roy Chowdhury (Ph.D., Clark University, 2003)
Professor Roy Chowdhury's current research focuses on landscape and ecosystem transformations in tropical forest/agricultural mosaics, and applies remote sensing as well as GIS technologies and models to explain such transformations. Her studies of social-ecological-institutional systems in the southern Yucatán of Mexico highlight the interactions among small-holder agricultural decisions and economic/environmental policies and institutions, and trace the consequences of such interaction for farming livelihoods, landscape patterns, and ecological diversity. For instance, her research links land-use decisions spatially and empirically to the driving forces of land-use change, both socioeconomic (e.g., household demography, agricultural, and forest policies) and biophysical (elevations, forest types, etc.). The ecological consequences of those decisions are evaluated at multiple scales ranging from the landscape (e.g., forest fragmentation and connectivity) to the ecosystem or community (e.g., changes in tree diversity and soil nutrient stocks in successional forests). Prof. Roy Chowdhury's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, a University of Miami McLamore Award, and a grant from UM's Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy, among other sources.
Shouraseni Sen Roy (Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2005)
Professor Sen Roy is interested in long-term trends in different climatic variables and their impacts on other physical as well as socieconomic processes. She emphasizes the development and application of spatial analysis using GIS. Her research has focused on the spatio-temporal patterns of precipitation over the Indian subcontinent, including the role of such global teleconnections as ENSO and PDO. Her research is not limited to South Asia, and has also focused on diurnal precipitation patterns across the conterminous U.S and Hawai'i. Among her current projects are the role of Green Revolution-induced land-use changes on long-term temperature trends, and the urban-heat-island effects in the Delhi-New Delhi metropolitan area.
Ira M. Sheskin (Ph.D., Ohio State University, 1977)
Professor Sheskin is widely recognized for his work on the geography and demography of the American Jewish community. His areas of expertise involve the collection, analysis, and presentation of quantitative data. He recently completed work on a series of grants awarded by Visit Florida that examined the impact of various events, including the Iraq War and major hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, on the state's tourism. He has also completed work on a grant to study the needs of the elderly population in the City of Coral Gables. He has authored nearly 40 studies of Jewish communities across the United States. He is past Chair of both the Transportation Geography and Ethnic Geography Specialty Groups of the Association of American Geographers.
