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We’ve arrived at the end of a difficult year. As Professor Bill Travis wrote in the Spring newsletter, the campus shut down in March, causing all classes to go remote. This Fall Semester has been equally tumultuous. We opened with a mix of in-person, remote, online, and hybrid classes. When COVID19 infection rates became too high in late September, all classes went remote for several weeks. Many classes returned to hybrid and in-person teaching until mid-November, when we went back to an all-virtual campus. Adapting and switching classes to different and sometimes multiple modalities has meant a significantly increased workload for instructors – both faculty and graduate students. In the meantime, learning mostly through a Zoom screen and public health restrictions on most other activities also posed significant challenges to students, not least of which is social isolation. The global pandemic has also had severe economic consequences. Loss of state funding and lower enrollments across the university have resulted in salary and budget cuts from which a recovery will not be immediate.

 

Against all of these odds, our students, staff, and faculty have continued with their learning, research, and work. We congratulate the students who have graduated – as well as all of their friends and family members who have supported them in their efforts. Although we will not have in-person commencement ceremonies this academic year, we hope that they will be able to return later on to celebrate. We also hope that, once we return to in-person interactions, other alumni will also come back to visit!

The global pandemic has not been the only crisis of 2020. Unprecedented wildfires have scorched the U.S. West; indeed, three of the largest wildfires in Colorado history occurred in 2020.  Professor Jennifer Balch has been highly sought after by the media, to help the public understand why conventional firefighting alone cannot address the growing crisis. As she has pointed out, the devastating losses are due to global warming, human ignition (84% of fires in the US are started by people), and the continued building (and rebuilding) of millions of houses in the highly flammable wildland-urban interface. Similarly, Professor Colleen Reid was recently interviewed by Ira Flatow for NPR’s Science Friday about the health impacts of wildfire smoke. Anthropogenic climate change is also related to a very sad event, the untimely passing of Professor Emeritus Koni Steffen, at a field station he established thirty years ago on the Greenland ice sheet, when he fell into one of many crevasses that have appeared due to melting ice.

In less solemn news, we welcomed two new faculty members to our department this semester – Assistant Professor Guofeng Cao, a geographical information scientist who joins us from Texas Tech University, and Dr. Rachel Isaacs, a physical geographer whose Ph.D. is from the Pennsylvania State University.  Rachel’s teaching as an instructor spans Geography classes on our main campus as well as those offered through Continuing Education.

In another transition, Professor Barbara (“Babs”) Buttenfield joins the ranks of Professor Emerita at the end of this semester. Professor Buttenfield has been a highly productive scholar, mentor, and teacher since she arrived at ��������Ƶ Boulder Geography in 1996. She is widely recognized as an international leader in the fields of Cartography and GIS and has published extensively on the impacts of scale and resolution on data modeling, representing uncertainty, designing visualization tools for environmental modeling, and generalization of geospatial data. She is a Past President of the American Cartographic Association and a Fellow of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. Many of her former students have become professionals in cartography and GIScience at leading research programs in universities, in government, and in industry. In recognition of these and other contributions, she has just been awarded the . She plans to remain active in research in retirement.

Finally, our graduate students are spearheading an initiative to build a platform to better connect interested alumni with current graduate and undergraduate students. Although we are able to contact you all through the ��������Ƶ Boulder Alumni Association to send out this newsletter twice a year, we have never had a systematic way to communicate with those alumni who might be interested in other forms of involvement, such as mentoring, career advice, announcing internship or job opportunities, or general exchange of information with current students. To this end, we invite those who are interested to please subscribe to our "geog-alumni-connect" email list. Join by sending an email to "sympa@lists.colorado.edu". Leave the "Subject" field blank. The body of your email should contain only "SUBSCRIBE geog-alumni-connect Your Name". For example: "SUBSCRIBE geog-alumni-connect John Doe" (don't include the quotation marks). After you send, an email response will be sent to you notifying you of your inclusion in the list. Your email can be mostly composed for you by using this link.

The graduate students would also like to ask those interested to to tell us a bit more about yourself, including what capacities you are interested in engaging with current students. This new ��������Ƶ GEOG Platform can also serve as a way for alumni to connect with each other, beyond the occasional stories and updates that we receive and post in the newsletter. If you have any questions about this, please email our graduate student representative Xiaoling Chen. Of course, you can also contact me directly, and we always welcome your news, input and involvement, in any way.