Geospatial Data for Healthy Places: Building Environments for Active Living Through Opportunistic GIScience

On September 19 2019, I gave a lecture in the Methods: Mind the Gap Webinar Series of the National Institutes of Health Office of Disease Prevention (ODP): Geospatial data for healthy places: Building environments for active living through opportunistic GIScience.  A video of the lecture and slides is posted here

In this lecture, I discuss the role of geospatial technologies and data in facilitating quasi and natural experiments about built environment factors that encourage active living.   I also extend this idea to the concept of geographic information observatories: systems for ongoing data collection and analysis that facilitate opportunistic science that can leverage real-world events via ongoing observation, experimentation, and decision-support.

NSF Sustainable Urban Systems “New Mobility, Cities and Data” Workshop Report

On July 15-16 2019, a diverse group of university researchers and community stakeholders from Columbus, Ohio and Portland, Oregon participated in a workshop to explore issues surrounding new mobility technologies, sustainable urban systems and data.  This event was organized in response to the National Science Foundation Dear Colleague Letter (NSF 19-032; “Concepts for Advancing Sustainable Urban Systems (SUS) Research Networks”) released in December 2018.

Deeper scientific understanding of cities and more nuanced, effective sustainability policy and planning interventions are crucial as we move towards an almost completely urbanized planet by the end of the 21st century.  A pressing concern are questions and needs relating to new technology-enabled services that are disrupting the mobility landscape of cities.  Urban mobility is experiencing a revolution, much of it driven by the private sector, with new technologies and services involving light individual transport (e.g., scooters), shared vehicles, microtransit, mobility as a service and eventually connected and autonomous vehicles.  The impacts of the new mobility revolution on urban sustainability is uncertain: similar to the introduction of cars and highways in the early 20th century, it is possible that mobility technologies and services that individually appear to be sustainable and beneficial may collectively reshape cities to have larger environmental footprints, greater inequality and/or less economic flexibility and resilience.

Urban sustainability data observatories (USDOs) are a means for persistent, ongoing data collection, archiving and analysis to enable new knowledge about complex human and coupled human-natural systems, such as cities. They integrate many of the diverse elements that are needed to significantly advance sustainable urban systems (SUS) science. Importantly, they support new data and methods for understanding current SUS drivers and interactions, advancing comparative studies, developing the science to model the future of SUS, and fostering the science of knowledge co-production. USDOs can also facilitate more sensitive and nuanced understanding of how context and history shape the outcomes of policy and planning interventions in complex urban systems.  Finally, they can go beyond observation to enable platforms and processes for data-enabled engagement and discussions among heterogeneous stakeholders concerned with the environmental, social and economic future of their community.

A report on the workshop is now available here (in PDF) SUS Workshop Report – FINAL 25 Sept 2019.

Ohio State Geography is hiring! Tenure-track assistant professorship in Geospatial Data Science

The Department of Geography in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University invites applications for a tenure track position at the assistant professor level, commencing autumn semester 2018. The position is contingent on budgetary approval. We seek a scholar with expertise in areas such as spatial-temporal data analytics, spatial simulation and modeling, cyberGIS and high performance computing, and/or geovisualization. Preferred application domains include scholars who address issues surrounding sustainability, resilience and social equity in areas that include urban science, transportation and/or public health. The successful candidate will also be required to teach classes in the department’s GIS program.

This position is partially funded by Ohio State’s Discovery Themes Initiative, a significant faculty hiring investment in key thematic areas in which the university can build on its culture of academic collaboration to make a global impact. The successful candidate will join a highly collaborative interdisciplinary community of scholars in the Sustainable and Resilient Economy (SRE) program including faculty from social and behavioral sciences, environmental sciences, engineering, business, public health, and policy. The SRE program seeks to advance sustainability science by developing a more holistic understanding of sustainable and resilient production and consumption systems, human-environment interactions, and innovations in sustainable technologies and governance. Successful applicants will be expected to participate in or lead collaborative teams and interdisciplinary research on sustainability and resilience topics.

 

Qualifications:

A Ph.D. in GIScience or a closely related field is required. All applicants are expected to have very strong and fundable research programs and to contribute to both graduate and undergraduate supervision and instructions. Preferred qualifications include experience developing or working in interdisciplinary research teams, university teaching experience and experience mentoring members of underrepresented groups.  Appointment is contingent on the university’s verification of credentials and other information required by law and/or university policies, including but not limited to a criminal background check.

About Columbus:

The Ohio State University campus is located in Columbus, the capital city of Ohio. Columbus is the center of a rapidly growing and diverse metropolitan area with a population of over 1.5 million. The area offers a wide range of affordable housing, many cultural and recreational opportunities, excellent schools, and a strong economy based on government as well as service, transportation and technology industries. Columbus has consistently been rated as one of the Top U.S. cities for quality of life, and was selected as one of the Top 10 cities for African Americans to live, work, and play by Black Enterprise magazine. Additional information about the Columbus area is available at http://www.columbus.org.

Application Instructions:

Apply to Academic Jobs Online at: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/9712.  A complete application consists of a cover letter including teaching, research and service credentials, a curriculum vitae, up to three representative publications, and three letters of references. Inquiries may be directed to Morton O’Kelly at okelly.1@osu.edu. Applications received prior to November 15, 2017 will receive priority consideration.

The Ohio State University is committed to establishing a culturally and intellectually diverse environment, encouraging all members of our learning community to reach their full potential. We are responsive to dual-career families and strongly promote work-life balance to support our community members through a suite of institutionalized policies. We are an NSF Advance Institution and a member of the Ohio/Western Pennsylvania/West Virginia Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC).

The Ohio State University is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation or identity, national origin, disability status, or protected veteran status.