Out of all of the U.S. geography programs, Clark University has granted the largest number of doctoral degrees. Clark’s Graduate School of Geography is top-ranked by the National Research Council, and our Ph.D. students graduate with a deep body of knowledge and a slate of research publications that enrich the field.
Research Interests
From agro-forestry to urbanization, and environmental modeling to post-colonial theory, our doctoral students’ research interests are multifaceted and interdisciplinary, touching on the four main areas of geography:
- Earth System Science
- Geographic Information Science and Remote Sensing
- Human-Environment/Nature-Society Geography
- Urban-Economic Geography
Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications
Professional publications play a large role in our Ph.D. students’ academic careers. By the time they graduate, our Ph.D. students, on average, have published several peer-reviewed journal articles. Students collaborate with their advisers and sometimes with their committee members, and they also publish as sole authors.
Grants, Fellowships and Awards
Our Ph.D. students are extremely successful in securing grants to support their studies and their research. From 2014 to 2018, Ph.D. students secured more than $1.4 million in grants, often in collaboration with faculty, who provide critical feedback on proposals and write letters of support. Students’ funding comes from the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (NSF-DDRI) program, Society of Women Geographers, NASA and other organizations.
In addition, students earn fellowships and grants — such as the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Switzer Fellowship, Fulbright, Inter-America Foundation Fellowship, and Edna Bailey Sussman Fund Graduate Research Fellowship — for field work and other research activities.
The Graduate School of Geography supports Ph.D. students’ conference attendance and presentations through internal travel awards.
| Student | Grant/Research Title | Agency/Award |
|---|---|---|
| Bernadette Arakwiye (Faculty: J. Ronald Eastman) |
Student NESSF: Monitoring forest degradation and restoration in a post-conflict landscape: A multiscale assessment in Western Rwanda | National Aeronautics and Space Administration |
| Yifan Cai | International Technology Diffusion, South-South Trade, and Adaptive Capacity: Chinese Mobile Phone Companies in Emerging Markets | 2019 American Association of Geographers Asian Geography Specialty Group Graduate Student Paper Award |
| Michael Cecil (Faculty: Lyndon Estes) |
Integrating In Situ Sensor Data with Remote Sensing and Climate Grids to Forecast Crop Growth | Edna Bailey Sussman Fund Graduate Research Fellowship |
| Janae Davis | Toward Strategies for Addressing Labor and Social Equity in Integrated Conservation and Development Projects in the Southern Kalahari, South Africa | US Fulbright Student Research Award |
| Dylan Harris (Faculty: James McCarthy) |
DDRI: Telling the Story of Climate Change: Cultural Politics and Climate Consciousness | National Science Foundation |
| Dylan Harris | Telling the Story of Climate Change: Cultural Politics and Climate Consciousness | Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation Environmental Fellowship |
| Benjamin Fash (Faculty: Anthony Bebbington) |
Networked Community Economies as Alternatives to Extractivism in Honduras | Albert, Norma and Howard Geller ’77 Endowed Research Award (via George Perkins Marsh Institute) |
| Benjamin Fash | Commoning Toward Post-Extractivism in Honduras | US Fulbright Student Research Award |
| Benjamin Fash | Local Pathways to Water Security in Honduras | National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) |
| Jaclyn Guz (Faculty: Dominik Kulakowski) |
Feedbacks among climatically-driven disturbance regimes in the Swiss Alps | Albert, Norma and Howard Geller ’77 Endowed Research Award (via George Perkins Marsh Institute) |
| Jaclyn Guz | Feedbacks among climatically-driven disturbance regimes | Stu Shea United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation Endowed Scholarship from the USGIF Board of Directors |
| Jaclyn Guz | Feedbacks among climatically-driven disturbance regimes | South Texas Chapter, Texas American Water Works Association Scholarship |
| Jaclyn Guz | Feedbacks among climatically-driven disturbance regimes | Texas American Water Works Association Scholarship |
| Jaclyn Guz | Feedbacks among climatically-driven disturbance regimes | United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation Scholarship |
| Jaclyn Guz and Helen Rosko | Water Quality Inequality | The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), Graduate Pursuit Program |
| Catherine Jampel (Faculty: Anthony Bebbington) | DDRI: Disability, Inclusion and Sociospatial Transformation in US Workplaces | National Science Foundation |
| Wenjing Jiang | Contemporary Agrarian Transformation in China: Empowerment, Valuation and Distributive Justice in the Transfer of Farmland Use Rights (TFUR) | Association for Asian Studies (AAS) China and Inner Asia Council (CIAC) Small Grant |
| Tong Jiao (Faculty: Christopher Williams) | Student NESSF: Vegetation decline and recovery from the millennium drought in Australia: Novel quantitative analysis with multi-sensor and higher resolution data | National Aeronautics and Space Administration |
| Sam Khallaghi | Baseline & Transect Method Compared to Polygon Overlay Method to Measure Boundary Change | 2019 American Association of Geographers GIS and Remote Sensing Specialty Group Illustrated Paper Competition (Second Place) |
| Roopa Krithivasan | Wildlife as drivers of land change? Applying the Social Ecological System framework to analyze agricultural transitions in a human-wildlife conflict landscape | 2019 American Association of Geographers Mountain Specialty Group Student Research Award |
| Son Ca Lam (Faculty: Deborah Martin) |
STUDENT: Shifting grounds: Changes in the meaning of home for Vietnamese refugee women across generations | Society of Woman Geographers |
| Sarah SanGiovanni (Faculty: Deborah Martin and James Murphy) |
Ecodistrict Planning in the Pittsburgh Metro Region: The Sustainability Impacts of Neighborhood-Scale Climate Change Initiatives | Edna Bailey Sussman Fund Graduate Research Fellowship |
| Sarah SanGiovanni (Faculty: Deborah Martin and James Murphy) |
Experimenting with Urban Sustainability Governance: EcoDistrict Planning in the Pittsburgh Metro Region | Albert, Norma and Howard Geller ’77 Endowed Research Award (via George Perkins Marsh Institute) |
| Dan Santos (Faculty: James Murphy) | Investigating Environmental Applications of Biotechnology in Community Science Labs | Edna Bailey Sussman Fund Graduate Research Fellowship |
| Laura Sauls | Constructing territory: Regional coalitions, natural resource governance, and the quest for grassroots development alternatives in Mesoamerica | PEO International Scholar Award |
| Kristen Shake (Faculty: Deborah Martin and Karen Frey) |
DDRI: The uncertainties of sea ice: Socio-legal dynamics in changing Arctic oceanscape | National Science Foundation |
| Kaner Turker (Faculty: James Murphy) | DDRI: Assembling community economies in East and Southeast Turkey | National Science Foundation |
| Mara van den Bold (Faculty: James McCarthy) |
Greening Energy: The Politics of Solar Power in Senegal | Albert, Norma and Howard Geller ’77 Endowed Research Award (via George Perkins Marsh Institute) |
| Mara van den Bold (Faculty: James McCarthy) |
Examining the policy and funding landscape for climate change mitigation among Washington DC based development organizations | Edna Bailey Sussman Fund Graduate Research Fellowship |
| Mara van den Bold | Greening Energy: The Politics of Solar Power in Senegal | American Philosophical Society Lewis and Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research Award |
| Mara van den Bold | Greening Energy: The Politics of Solar Power in Senegal | American Geographical Society Council Fellowship |
| Michelle Wenderlich (Faculty: Mark Davidson) |
Participatory remunicipalization of energy as commoning within the state? Examining processes of change in Berlin and Minneapolis | Doctoral Research Fellowship, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (2018) |
| Su Ye (Faculty: John Rogan) |
Characterizing Bark Beetle Early Attack using Multi-Sensor Time Series in the Pine-Spruce Forest of Northern Colorado, USA | Albert, Norma and Howard Geller ’77 Endowed Research Award (via George Perkins Marsh Institute) |
| Su Ye | Characterizing Bark Beetle Early Attack and Post-infestation Regeneration Using Multi-Sensor Time Series in the Pine-Spruce Forest of Northern Colorado, USA | William A. Fischer Memorial Scholarship granted by American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) |
| Luisa Young (Faculty: Karen Frey) |
Impacts of a Warming Arctic on Marine Phytoplankton Assemblages | Edna Bailey Sussman Fund Graduate Research Fellowship |
Recent Dissertations
Our Ph.D. students conduct research across the world on issues ranging from the impact of mining on communities in South America to the decline of ice in the Arctic and Antarctica. For dissertation titles before 2012, visit the Burnham Index.
Teresa Bornschlegl: Three Snapshots into Complexity: A Political Ecological Analysis of Environmental Law Enforcement in the Oil and Gas Sector: Ecuador 2005–2015
Juan Luis Dammert Bello: Contested Booms: The Politics of Palm Oil Expansion in the Peruvian Amazon
Nathan Gill: Disturbance Interactions in Subalpine Forests: Compound Effects and Adaptive Resilience
Young-Long Kim: The Role of Big Data in Understanding Urban Vitality
Lauren L. Bonilla: Extractive Infrastructures: Social, Environmental, and Institutional Change in Resource-Rich Mongolia
Nicholas Joseph Cuba: Interannual Variability in the Extent and Intensity of Tropical Dry Forest Deciduousness in the Mexican Yucatán (2000-2016): Drivers and Links to Regional Atmospheric Conditions
Arthur Francis Marett Elmes: Assessing the Impact of Asian Longhorned Beetle in Worcester, MA: Thermal Effects, Community Responses, and Future Vulnerability
Miles Richard Kenney-Lazar: Resisting with the State: The Authoritarian Governance of Land in Laos
Dexter Henry Locke: A New Look at Residential Ecosystems Management: Heterogeneous Practices and the Landscape Mullets Hypotheses
Nathan Paul Mietkiewicz: Interactions Between Bark Beetle Outbreak and Wildland Fire in Intermountain Subalpine Forests of the Western United States: Legacies and Future Projections Under a Changing Climate
Padini Nirmal: Disembodiment and Deworlding: Taking Decolonial Feminist Political Ecology to Ground in Attappady, Kwala
Jefferson Alex Sphar: Politics, State Power and Policies: Exploring the Contemporary Nature of Economic Governance Through the Case of Brazil
Kevin Surprise: Preempting the Second Contradiction: The Political Economy of Solar Geoengineering
Mireya Bravo: Trajectories of Empathy and Institution Building: The Micropolitics of Environmental Governance in the Oxapampa-Ashaninka-Yanesha Biosphere Reserve
Alida Anna Cantor: Dust Storms and Dying Lakes: Wastefulness, Reasonable and Beneficial Use, and Water Transfers in California
Katherine E. Foo: Parks and Recreation Departments are Not a Joke: Environmental Governance in an Age of Post-Apocalyptic Climate Change
Emily J. Gallagher: Ghana is Cocoa, Carbon is Ghana: Sustaining Cocoa Landscapes and Governing Forest Livelihoods Through Agri-Environmental Extension
Daniel S. Jarvis: Disturbance History and Fuel Consequences of Mountain Pine Beetle in Western Colorado
Adrienne Johnson: Participatory Governance, Plant Disease, and Post-Neoliberalism: Governing Ecuador’s Palm Oil Industry through the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)
Kelly Kay: Taxes, TIMOs, and Trusts: 21st Century Land Conservation in the United States
Christopher Storr Knudson: Predictable Loss: Climate Risk Insurance in St. Lucia
Kathryn-Louise Meng: Transition through Co-optation: Harnessing Carbon Democracy for Clean Energy
Pheakkdey Nguon: Governing REDD+ in Cambodia: Co-production of Salient, Credible and Legitimate Policy Knowledge
Khury Joseph Petersen-Smith: Pivoting to Asia: Sovereignty, Territory and Militarization
John Taylor Shelton: Geographies of Data: Toward a Relational Socio-spatial Analysis of Geotagged Social Media Data
Yueming Zhang: Capitalizing on Art, Aestheticizing Capital: The Making and Consuming of Arts Districts in Chinese Cities
John Lauermann: Event-Led Development: Sporting Mega-Events as Urban Policy Experiments
Oona Morrow: Urban Homesteading: Diverse Economics and Ecologies of Provisioning in Greater Boston
Kangping Si: Multiple-Objective Spatial Optimization with Application to Site Search Problems in a Raster Space
James E. Thatcher: Mobile Navigation Applications: Hidden Ontologies, Epistemic Limits, and Technological Teleology
Luke David Trusel: Quantifying Antarctic Ice Sheet Surface Melt: Recent Dynamics and Future Trajectories
Melanie Vanderhoof: The Impact of Mountain Pine Beetle Outbreaks on Surface Energy and Water Fluxes, South Central Rocky Mountains
Connie Lewis Johnston: The Social, Spatial and Scientific Aspects of Farm Animal Welfare in the US and European Union
William E. Kutz: Financing Demand-Side Urbanism: Lessons from the “Spatial-Fix” in Tangier, Morocco
Elisabeth Anne Stoddard: Livestock Vulnerability to Disasters in North Carolina’s Hog Industry: Neoliberal Governance and Differential Risk in an Industry Too Big to Fail
Qingling Wu: From Phenomena to Objects: Sementation of Fuzzy Objects and its Application to Oceanic Eddies
Nicholas M. Giner: Validating, Analyzing, and Predicting Lawn Maps: Application of GIScience and Spatial Analysis in the Northern Boston Suburbs
Daniel Haberly: Sovereign Wealth Funds, Dependent Development, and the New Alliance Capitalism
Edmund Harris: Visions, Plans and Maps: Making Space for Food Systems Change in Massachusetts
Rory William Horner: The State, Patents and the Development of India’s Pharmaceutical Industry
Maya Manzi: Agrarian Social Movements and the Making of Agrodiesel Moral Territories in Northeast Brazil
Prajjwal Kumar Panday: Hindu Kush-Himalayan Region at the Forefront of Global Change: An Assessment of Snowmelt, Hydrology, Vegetation, and Climate
Seth D. Schindler: Producing Urban Space and the Transformation of the Retail Sector in Delhi, India
Jill Marie Williams: When Arrest Becomes Rescue: Border Enforcement and the Politics of Humanitarianism on the US-Mexico Border
Safaa Aldwaik: Fundamental Concepts of Intensity Analysis to Understand Changes Among Categories
Susan Aragon-Carrasco: Evaluating Biodiversity in Rural Landscapes for Conservation and Livelihoods: Combined Botanical, Ecological and Land Use Analysis in Two Smallholder Communities in Peru and Mexico
Danielle Fontaine: The Landscape of Potential Harm: Understanding Parents’ Perceptions of the Build Environment and What This Means for Their Decisions about Their Child’s Mode of Travel to School in the City of Worcester, MA
Jayson Funke: Producing Investment Space: The International Finance Corporation, Institution Building and the Financialization of Development
Bardan Ghimire: Biological and Biophysical Consequences of Disturbances in Forests of the Western United States
Guoyi Han: Understanding Regional Dynamics of Vulnerability: A Historical Approach to the Flood Problem in China
Roberta Hawkins: Cause-related Marketing: Ethical Consumption as Development Intervention
Heladius Madoshi Makene: Gold Rush and its Implications for Communities Near Mines in Tanzania
Neeti Neeti: Implications of Space-Time Orientations for Spectoral Decomposition of Geographic Image Time Series
Diana Ojeda: Producing Paradise: The Violent Geographies of Tourism in Colombia
Benoit Parmentier: Land Transitions from Multivariate Remotely Sensed Time Series: Using Seasonal Trends to Characterize and Categorize Land Cover Changes in Alaska over the 2001-2009 Period
Rahul Rakshit: Accuracy Assessments of Object-Based Image Analysis Maps
Daniel Runfola: Human-Environment Interactions across Space and Time: Examining Lawns and Land Change in the United States
Dominique Werboff: The Role of Institutions in Shaping Livelihoods and Land Use/Cover in Northern Negros Natural Park, Philippines