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The spring semester began with in-person classes and masks on. This eventually transitioned to masks optional, and we ended the semester with our first in-person graduation since 2019. The Geography Department’s graduation celebration included students from previous years along with the 2022 graduating class. It was wonderful to see students and their families enjoying the day together. This year’s graduation festivities were a reminder of the importance of celebration and coming together as an academic community to acknowledge the accomplishments of Geography’s undergraduate majors and minors, Masters and PhD students. 

This newsletter includes several stories about the amazing research and work being done by our current and former graduate students. This newsletter also features the timely research of our faculty. Assistant Professor Colleen Reid provides an overview of her new research project, which examines the impacts of air pollution on human health resulting from the devastating Marshall fire in Boulder County, which caused the deaths of two people and destroyed over a thousand homes. Professor John O’Loughlin, a political geographer and expert on 91��Ƭ�� and post-Soviet countries, provides a thoughtful and insightful overview of the 91��Ƭ��n invasion of Ukraine.

In addition to these contributions, we are pleased to celebrate the accomplishments of our faculty and students. Professor Tim Oakes received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the Graduate School. Graduate Student, Sade Cromratie, was awarded the Laramide Chapter GEOID Scholarship from the Association for Women Geoscientists (AWG), and Graduate Student, Katarena Matos, was awarded a Ford Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship. Congratulations all! We look forward to continuing to share the achievements of our faculty and students in the future.

Ukrainian servicemen get ready to repel an attack in Ukraine's Lugansk region on February 24, 2022. ANATOLII STEPANOV

In the early morning hours of February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin launched his attack on Ukraine – or as Ukrainians put it, started the re-invasion of Ukraine. The first invasion dates from March 2014 when the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was annexed by 91��Ƭ�� and the fighting of the Donbas region resulting in over 14,000 dead by early this year. Both wars were reactions to the successful pro-West street protests that led to the overthrow of the Kyiv regime of Viktor Yanukovich that had tethered Ukraine’s future to Moscow.  

The scale and intensity of the 2022 attack on Ukraine that has quickly resulted in more than 50,000 estimated civilian and military deaths in two months is shocking. 91��Ƭ�� 30% of the pre-war population is displaced, including over 5 million refugees fleeing the country and another 7 million forced to move within Ukraine. While Putin’s speeches and writings on Ukraine and NATO were closely watched for the past year, the actions that he threatened to reverse the drift of Ukraine to the West were not considered likely, until they actually happened.

I have been doing research in Ukraine for the past three decades, first visiting the newly independent Ukraine in the early 1990s. I have interviewed officials, activists, and ordinary people in all parts of the country from L’viv in the west to Kyiv to the Donbas in the east and south to Crimea. Over the past few years, with National Science Foundation support, I have conducted seven large public opinion polls (with about 15000 respondents), both nationally and in the contested areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as well as in Crimea. While the questions focus on war experiences and outcomes, geopolitical preferences and reconciliation attitudes, my writings have stressed the complexity of the Ukraine story in terms of its regionally- and locally-based diversity of nationalities, orientations and historical legacies.   

Rescuers work to remove debris from a building that was hit in a military strike, amid 91��Ƭ��'s invasion, in Odesa, Ukraine, April 24, 2022. REUTERS/Igor Tkachenko

The current conflict has definitely made Ukraine “more Ukrainian”. By that, I mean it has certified and concretized a trend since the 2014 EuroMaidan revolution of hardening anti-91��Ƭ��n feelings, promoting a sense of ‘civic identity’ separate from the ethnic affiliations, increasing attachment to Ukrainian institutions, broadening support for being part of the Western community, and speeding up an ongoing re-identification away from “91��Ƭ��n” to “Ukrainian”. This re-identification is clearly seen in the large numbers shifting their language use from 91��Ƭ��n to Ukrainian and now stating that their nationality is Ukrainian when in the past, they would have answered 91��Ƭ��n. Recent wartime polls have documented a remarkable consensus of pride in the actions of the Zelenskiy government, in the defense of country by the armed forces and volunteers, and in the resilience of ordinary people. 

While my research has tracked (geo)political developments, like most, I was initially hopeful that war could be avoided. But by mid-January, I was pessimistic enough based on the scale of the 91��Ƭ��n military build-up on the borders that I predicted an attack between February 20-24 with a 70% probability to my Geography 3882 class (Geographies of the Former Soviet Union). Faced with student skepticism about the confidence of the prediction, I wrote this prediction on the board but hoped to be wrong. In pre-war interviews, I expressed deep concern for the huge casualties that I foresaw in the event of a 91��Ƭ��n attack, a pessimism borne out by the events of the past two months.

My post-Soviet class this semester has frequently veered away from the syllabus to discuss current events in Ukraine. Students ask a lot of questions about Putin’s intentions, about Ukrainian resistance, about US/NATO actions and the efficacy of Western sanctions on 91��Ƭ��.  In answer to my questions about their information sources, it seems that few read newspapers and fewer watch television. The majority get their information from social media, with all the implications that has for funneled information and risks of disinformation.   

Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary who was commander of the Red Army in the 91��Ƭ��n Civil War, was (incorrectly) reported to have said that “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”  This aphorism resonated in the United States in February as oil price rises became evident at the pump and inflation gathered pace. In many of my twenty-plus interviews with local and national media, the impact of the war on Americans far removed from the conflict was often the focus. I maintain a focus on the terrible destruction in Ukraine and the sanctuary of distance from Europe, a region much more affected by the war’s consequences. I avoid policy assertions as there are far too many prognosticators with agendas who do so without detailed background information on the “Crush Zone”, as the British geographer James Fairgrieve named it in 1915. A pleasant surprise has been the emails that I have received from former students in my Political Geography class, some from 25 years ago, who remembered my lectures on the geopolitics of West-91��Ƭ�� competition in the post-Cold War period and the continued relevance of classic ways of geographic conceptualizing in this current environment.

In recent academic and public seminars, as well as in multiple articles in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog – most recently about based on a large January 2022 survey, I have stressed the complexity of the local geographies of geopolitical aspirations. The dissonance between the views of ordinary people and the political figures, both in the region and beyond, who treat these beliefs with either distain or blind ignorance remains a source of deep frustration to me. We should renew attention to the that showed that most people, living either in the Kyiv-controlled or the separatist regions, cared less about which flag flew over their community than their ability to live a normal life, free from violence and with a quality of life that offers minimal security for their family’s future.

Xiaoling Chen, PhD Candidate, Geography Department, University of Colorado Boulder

“For the People’s Health”: Transforming Hospital Spaces, Recasting Medical Expertise

Ling is a coastal, hilly county in Southern China with a humid and semi-tropical climate. Although having a population of over one million, it is at times considered rural, with pockets of farmland and individual houses within its urban areas and sprawling farm villages drastically giving way to urban concrete high-rises. I came to study the healthcare landscape of China as shaped by the post-2009 governmental health care reforms, focusing on the everyday experiences of healthcare workers and patients. Although invisible among the physical structures, the healthcare landscape was just as solid in the lives of people. Since 2020 though, it has become increasingly noticeable due to Covid-19 as blockades and checkpoints appear in public spaces, communities, business areas, and local markets. Throat swabs, health apps, and masks have become necessities for healthcare workers and ordinary people on a daily basis. 

I began fieldwork from July 2021 and started participant-observation and interviewing at Ling’s&�Բ�����;People’s Hospital as a visiting scholar. Occasionally, I visited the Hospital’s collaborative institutions in townships, as well as COVID-19 vaccination and saliva sampling sites. In China, county and city seats are considered urban areas, and townships and villages rural places. The Neurology Department and its affiliated Stroke Center for Comprehensive Prevention and Treatment which hosted me, treat elderly with cerebrovascular diseases – China’s number 3 killer. The Stroke Center also provided me a unique opportunity to observe how a system under transformation responds to the nationwide impacts of an aging society. 

After 50 years of reform and opening up, the images people have of China include gleaming cities and fast trains crisscrossing the country. Just as dramatic, yet unnoticed, have been the changes to the institutions and ways of providing healthcare. The evolution from a socialist top-down approach of providing public services, the influence of modern healthcare ideas from outside, and changing norms of what healthcare is, have intersected to transform hospital spaces and created new ways for “doing” healthcare, under the auspice of a political system with changing values, processes, and means. 

The Reform and Opening Up era (1980s-2000s) saw the emergence of a fragmented “neoliberal” health system. The system lacked public funding and profited from selling drugs (with up to a 15% markup) and curative care. During this period, thanks to many historical and contemporary factors such as administrative endorsement, expertise, and reputation, public hospitals in cities and counties outgrew primary health care institutions as well as private entities. Primary health care institutions were those small-scale facilities located in townships, urban communities, and rural villages. 

The socialist public health network was dismantled, and healthcare demand increased. It was estimated at that time that large-scale urban public hospitals would attract up to 90% of patients, creating a nationwide problem of low healthcare accessibility and affordability. During this period, public healthcare facilities were only public in name and operated with a profit motive. Social discontent arose and medical disputes pervaded hospital spaces, while healthcare professionals suffered, or even died from assaults by patients and their family. These issues have lingered until the present.

In 2009, the central government, through a new round of health care reform, attempted to strengthen administrative control over all public healthcare facilities. It hoped to (re-)establish a hierarchical health care system (Figure 1) which upholds its socialist, public nature to provide affordable healthcare and to meet the population’s increased yet unsatisfied health demands. 

Figure 1. China’s Hierarchical Health Care System

While history and the government goals seem straight-forward, reality is messy and unpredictable. A public hospital is more than a physical space that passively absorb any reform impacts. Social actors – hospital administrators, doctors, nurses, patients and their caregivers - create and recreate the place’s structures, operational mechanisms, and relationships, on which parts of their aspirations and identities reside. This workspace is infused with sociocultural norms and local interpersonal relationships (i.e. renqing and guanxi). Boundaries between work and home, and between healthcare as a common resource and a private good, get blurred. Reform policies seep through the everydayness of such a space, negotiating with and reconfiguring these structures, relationships, and mechanisms. 

The logics of spatial inequalities in public funding, healthcare expertise, and income levels along the line of administrative division run deep in the health care system. Primary health care institutions are now entirely publicly funded and expected to serve a large proportion of patients as their expertise improves; many have expensive, state-of-the-art medical devices they could not afford prior to 2009. 

Public hospitals, contrary to the primary institutions, remain underfunded and incentivized to make profits. Meanwhile, they are subject to increasingly stringent policies from a growing list of regulators including the National Healthcare Security Administration and the National Health Commission through their local agents. In particular, public county hospitals, sandwiched between city hospitals and primary institutions, are still over-crowded with patients, some with ailments as minor as a cold. 

Many doctors think their hard-earned expertise is not being adequately used, and their hard-work (as well as overwork and holiday-stripped shifts) insufficiently rewarded and respected. Thus, it has become increasingly difficult for doctors and nurses, physically and emotionally depleted, to empathize with their patients, creating a breeding ground for mistrust and disputes. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the large group of medical professionals in public county hospitals form a buffer zone for public discontent over the flawed health care system. 

China has reportedly achieved its goals of universal healthcare from the perspectives of patients. Such successes include sustained health insurance coverage rates of over 95% since 2011, and affordable healthcare to a large population in need – with merely 30% out-of-pocket health expenditure. However, how the process changes hospital spaces remains poorly studied. My research provides a unique account of everyday experience in hospital spaces, by working closely with actors like doctors, nurses, patients, and caregivers to form a comprehensive picture of healthcare provision in the new reform era. 

This field trip is made possible by the generous support from the Geography Department through the Jennifer Dinaburg Memorial Research Award and the Solstice Graduate Research Award, from the University of Colorado Boulder through the Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant award and the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTSS), and from the Society of Woman Geographers through the Evelyn L. Pruitt National Fellowship for Dissertation Research. I will return onto campus by fall 2022 and begin my dissertation writing process. 

This past February, I received the Outstanding Student Presentation Award (OSPA) from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) for his presentation at the AGU Fall Meeting 2021. According to the AGU, "this honor is awarded for only the most exceptional presentations during AGU Fall Meeting 2021."

I am a PhD student at our department and prior to joining CU, I completed a B.Sc. in Geomatics Engineering and an M.Sc. in GIS Engineering at K.N.Toosi University of Tech. in Iran, and an M.A. in Geography at University of California Santa Barbara. My research focuses on spatiotemporal machine learning, including both classification and regression problems and my work is motivated by two major application domains: the classification of sea ice from satellite-based radar imagery captured over the Arctic, and forecasting the spread of COVID-19 across the United States.

I won the OSPA award for a presentation titled "A Comparison of Classic Deep Learning Architectures For Sea Ice Classification From SAR". In this work, I explored the idea of transfer learning in the context of classification of different sea ice types from Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. The state-of-the-art image classification models are trained on images of everyday objects such as animals, symbols, and vehicles. Needless to say, this is very different from the contents of a standard optical or radar image acquired by a satellite. The idea of modifying a model trained on everyday objects in order to use it in a different domain, remotely sensed radar imagery in this case, is called transfer learning.

I compared the performance of some of the most used models from the field of computer vision in the task of classifying sea ice in radar images. To this end, I examined whether what these models have learned from everyday images can be transferred to the radar imagery, and if so, to what extent. This is significant because the amount of labeled radar imagery is limited. The findings of this study can help researchers make informed decisions when designing deep learning-based classification models for sea ice. 

Inspired by these findings, I am currently working on developing more powerful classification models that can achieve high performance with limited data and hopefully help those experts in the task of sea ice charting in the near future.

I would like to thank his advisor Dr. Morteza Karimzadeh and his co-author Dr. Benjamin Lucas for their help and support, and the CU Boulder Geography for the great environment it has provided for research and collaboration. 

After retirement I incorporated my remote sensing skills into my landscape photography, along the way inventing what I call, "Cloud Cartography". I have shown and sold some of my photographs at art shows and in a gallery in Texas; now that we've moved to Golden I intend to continue along that path.

Xi Wang (Ph.D. 2021), Assistant Professor, Institute for Energy Studies and Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, Western Washington University

I completed my Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder in May of 2021, while the world was still quite unsure what was happening with the COVID-19 pandemic, whether the variants that would emerge in the U.S. after Alpha, Beta, and Delta would become even more contagious, how effective recently-available vaccines would be, whether removing mask mandates as summer was blossoming would return us to “normal,” and whether education in the coming fall would be delivered remotely, face-to-face, or some hybrid of the two. As for me, I was scrambling to finish my dissertation and arrange my defense after a year of teaching Geography courses remotely through CU’s Continuing Education program; five weeks after having been sick in bed with COVID—and was still struggling to walk for more than a block without fatigue and wheezing; and a month after interviewing (remotely) for the assistant professor position that I am now in. 

Our department graduation was also conducted on Zoom—a platform that now needs no explanation. And my dissertation defense was the first one held face-to-face in Guggenheim for probably more than a year after the pandemic had become the reality of our lives, and it also had a Zoom component so that the people who had supported me during my graduate years could join from afar. But almost all of my committee attended in person, and so did a few friends. After the defense, I quickly said my farewells, met up with close friends and a former student, said goodbye to the people at my favorite watering hole, Trident Café, held a small outdoor gathering with my co-op housemates, and rapidly packed up all the belongings I had accrued in a place I called home for nearly a decade onto an RV and drove onto my next destination. The last few years have been odd, among other things.

COVID-19 amplifies so many of the themes that pervade our lives—some that have been ubiquitous and others that had been more hidden—including many that are explored in the discipline of Human Geography and the field of political economy. These include themes of space and time; of strong and weak connections; of relationality; of the material and how changes in production processes and supply chains impact different individuals differentially; and how wealth creation and distribution often exacerbate existing disparities, especially in times of crisis—be it a global pandemic or the Ukraine-91��Ƭ��n war. This past year is the first in awhile that I have had to procure my own groceries (I had lived in a housing co-op where others did this chore), and I have been shocked at the quickly rising food prices. As I write in mid-April 2022, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that international wheat prices have increased by 50% between February and late March, approaching 450 USD for a metric ton that a year ago had costed 225 USD. Both Ukraine and the 91��Ƭ��n Federation are exporters of wheat and the natural gas needed to produce nitrogen-based fertilizer, and the war—in short—is impacting supplies. Our globalized economy means that we all feel these impacts, but experience them differentially—I may be miffed by having to pay more for food, but inflation, rising food and fuel costs coupled with an economy that has struggled under COVID-19 lockdowns have led to hunger and massive protests in Peru, and I wonder what kind of blow soaring wheat and maize prices are having on Somalian herders whose livelihoods have already been devasted by more frequent and longer-lasting droughts in the last decade. I sometimes feel at a loss for what to do amidst everything that is happening. 

Geography, the field of political economy, my co-advisers Dr. Emily Yeh and Dr. William Boyd, and the faculty and graduate students at CU have given me invaluable analytical frameworks and tools to make sense of phenomena happening at different scales of space and time. Agrarian households tied to world markets that have been made vulnerable to climate change and global commodity price fluctuations is not a new story, I tell a version of it in my dissertation chapter on dairy farmers in Inner Mongolia, China. The broader story I tell in my dissertation is that the massive amount of overcapacity in Chinese coal power generation the past decade has been deliberate—that it is a product of the Chinese state’s imperative to maintain large flows of capital investment and economic growth. And the consequences are profound for the workers who build these power plants and nearby villagers, as well as for local and regional environmental pollution and global climate change.

After my graduate work, and right before the global pandemic turned the world upside down, I started a postdoctoral fellowship at the USGS Social and Economic Analysis Branch, where I served as one of two social science leads on a federal taskforce developing the new to help land managers respond to ecological transformation.  In this role, I helped guide federal land and resource management policy for National Parks, National Refuges and other federal lands and coproduced research projects to improve resource management policy. Increasingly, public land managers are confronting difficult decisions about ecological transformation, when a system shifts in state or function.  For example, my research explored manager decision making on the Kenai Peninsula where wildfires and beetle outbreaks lead a boreal forest to convert to a grassland, complicating resource management.  What should a manager do when their landscape doesn’t match their management plans? How much and in which ways should they intervene in landscape level changes?  What are the consequences of these management decisions for the people who use and rely on public lands? 

I am also developing a few new projects at WWA at the intersection of climate impacts and equity. One explores intersection between housing affordability and climate adaptation, engaging these tensions in the aftermath of the recent Marshall Fire in Boulder County, and partnering with Resident-Owned Manufactured Housing Communities who are often exposed to greater climate risk than other housing types. Another builds off my graduate work, examining a broader suite of air quality issues (like wildfire smoke) and further investigating the politics of environmental monitoring. To support and guide the work of WWA, I am developing resilience indicators and metrics to track the impact of our science and better connect resilience theory with practice. With such a large list of important work, and very geographic work, I am always looking for more collaboration, especially from current geography students interested in engaged work on climate impacts.

Chevalier Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Transportation and Development in China
Institute for Asian Research, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs
University of British Columbia

My journey to CU and fascination with China began during my first summer in Beijing in 2008. From there, I lived in Dalian, China as a Princeton-in-Asia Fellow (2009-10) and subsequently worked in Shanghai (2010) and for a Tibetan NGO in Shangri-la, Yunnan (2012-13). Many of my reflections on these early years in China involve infrastructure. I remember the excitement of China’s first high-speed rail rolling into Beijing, and the engineering feat of a train to Lhasa, high on the Tibetan plateau. I vividly recall wandering the humongous ports in Dalian and wondering what was so special about a new economic zone. Years later, as I began my PhD, I knew I wanted to think about China’s global expansion in development within and beyond China’s borders. CU geography was clearly an ideal place to do so. I had learned about the department and Emily’s work during my Masters at the University of California Berkeley (2014-16). After presenting her book, Taming Tibet, in a political ecology seminar, Emily kindly made time to discuss it with me on the phone (a rarity with academic schedules!). I quickly decided that I would apply to work with her at CU. 

My dissertation – – developed an ethnography of global China centered on one infrastructural corridor and three projects that have become emblematic of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): the Laos–China Railway, Laos–China Economic Corridor, and Boten Special Economic Zone. Drawing on seventeen months of fieldwork, I suggest that the infrastructure frontier is made through the discursive repetition of the need to unblock Laos; undervaluation of land; spectacle and performance to attract capital; more-than-economic logics of Chinese capital; and both Lao and Chinese state-support. I am committed to long-term ethnographic fieldwork and spent time cycling and motorcycling the corridor as part of my methodology (see image). 

I am thrilled to be able to expand on my doctoral work and launch an ambitious research agenda as I begin to apply for tenure track professorships. As a postdoc, I am developing articles and a book project from my dissertation. In my first semester, I’ve focused on revising articles on the temporality of infrastructure and project finance as a spatial fix, as well as a book chapter on Laos’ infrastructural history. I’ll soon turn to a book proposal. In addition to publications, at UBC I am crafting a policy-oriented research agenda by holding two workshops during my two-year tenure. The first will include a book launch for my co-edited volume (below) and panel with some of the authors to share grounded perspectives on geopolitical competition in infrastructure. My second workshop in 2023 aims to take stock of the BRI ten years after it was first announced, from both social science and policy perspectives. Finally, I’m very excited to teach three courses for the Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs program: Resource Governance and the Environment; Grounding Global China; and Asia Policy and Practice.

Beyond UBC, I serve on the editorial board at and Global China Pulse, and view them as exciting ways to engage a wide network of researchers and civil society actors interested in grounded perspectives on China’s overseas investment. I act as a collaborator on the Swiss National Science Foundation project at the University of Zurich. I’m also consulting on the environmental implications of the BRI. In 2019, I was a Global China Research Fellow at Boston University’s , which I highly recommend to other China-oriented PhD students at CU. 

Finally, I look forward to the release of my co-edited book in August 2022: , which includes a chapter from fellow CU Geography alum Meredith DeBoom. From this project, I co-founded to foster more critical conversations on geopolitical competition. 

I am endlessly grateful for all that CU Geography has taught me and for the incredible people that have illuminated my life. I feel very fortunate for the opportunity to continue to engage in the conversations and scholarship that I’ve cultivated over my years in the department, and hope that I can pass on the same generosity of spirit and intellect. In my freetime, I continue to explore the mountains and oceans with my huskies, Nikita and Huckleberry.

For more information see: .

Alana Wilson: I completed my Ph.D. in Geography at CU Boulder in December 2017, having done hydrochemistry and cryosphere related research with Mark Williams and Noah Molotch, and with Jennifer Fluri supporting a social science component to my water work. The combination of cryosphere-related research and an increasingly long period of time living without owning a car (since 2004 and counting) meant I spent a lot of time thinking about transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. Over the years in Boulder I lived in housing co-ops and used Colorado Carshare when needed. My personal passion shifted in the direction of sustainable transportation as one of our best collective opportunities for rapid reductions of GHG emissions. So, after graduating I approached a group I had gotten to know well over the years - campus staff working on transportation – and asked for a job. They graciously funded me as a post-doc in the Program in Environmental Design (ENVD) working on sustainable campus transportation. My efforts included teaching planning studios and supporting transportation and facilities staff with two successful grant applications to fund CU’s first four electric Buff Buses, which you should be seeing soon!!

Through campus-based work I connected with transportation researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, CO, a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy. I joined the lab as a post-doc in December 2018 and have stayed on as a researcher. NREL is best known for wind and solar research and development, but there is an increasingly large group working on many aspects of transportation – from the chemistry of batteries to behavioral science. While the shift from physical geography to transportation research may seem like a big leap, being a geographer was very strategic for me. I have been able to apply the same skills – research design, quantitative analysis, and managing research projects - to different subject areas. 

At NREL, I work with social scientists and engineers to provide geospatial and statistical analyses, with particular attention to energy efficient transportation modes such as transit, bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, and cargo bikes. My team also provides analysis support to the national network of Clean Cities Coalitions. We also work a bit behind the scenes supporting a variety of external partners on sustainable and equitable mobility shifts. A few current ones include the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (the largest municipal utility in the U.S. and aiming to be carbon-free by 2035) and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (which is currently implementing an $85 million Clean Transportation Prize Program). I love that geography enabled me to be nimble in seizing these opportunities and prepared me well for an interdisciplinary research career.

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