Faculty member Ningchuan Xiao had already been working on the necessary curricular groundwork to launch an online Master’s of Science in Geographic Information Systems. The GIS faculty, particularly Senior Lecturer Emily Castellucci, aided by our ASC Tech Systems Administrator, Jens Blegvad, figured out a system for students to log on to lab machines remotely and run software. We had to figure out how to move our Geographic Information Systems labs online in a very short period of time, for our second largest group of majors and classes that are quite full (and expanding!). New interdisciplinary collaborations that make the best use of our collective geographic expertise are exciting to see. Professors Becky Mansfield, Huyen Le and Alvaro Montenegro came together to write seed grant proposals connecting the dots among environment policy, human mobility and air pollution as a complicating factor in COVID-19 spread and outcomes. She has proven herself to be a critical member of the governor’s team in spatial analysis and modeling of COVID-19 spread, including its relationship to important covariates like urban density. Professor Elisabeth Root has been embedded in the Ohio Department of Health since last spring. I attended a meeting of the College of Arts and Sciences department chairs in a large lecture hall on Tuesday, March 10to plan for moving all courses online: I wonder when the next such large gathering will happen on campus? As chair during a pandemic, I have been inspired by my colleagues in so many ways. Back in March, in Derby 1036, we were already contemplating the changes we had to make. Serving in a leadership role, crisis or no, is always a privilege. It is one thing to study coupled human-natural systems in theory, and see the outcomes unfolding in practice, however. Just last fall, 2019, in Geog5402 (Land Use Geography) we began the semester discussing the good and bad of human impact on ecosystems: that Chernobyl has become an unlikely wildlife refuge, while the movie Contagion(2011) paints the cascading interactions of urban development, wildlife, livestock, and global business travel, to launch a pandemic based on a fictionalized version of a Nipahtype virus. Darla Munroe, Department ChairĪs someone who studies global environmental change, and the importance of natural resources for economies, I have long expected some global natural disaster to happen in my lifetime.

My lab master geography