Robert J. French

Robert French, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Southern Maine, also known for his knowledge, love and collection of road maps, passed away on March 3, 2016 at the age of 80.

Robert Joseph French was born on January 3, 1936, in Boston, MA. He grew up in the Brookline area of the city and graduated from Brookline High School in 1953. In subsequent studies he received a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1957, a master’s degree in education from Northeastern University in 1967, and a master’s degree in geography from Clark University in 1972.

He joined the faculty at the University of Southern Maine in 1969 and taught geography in the Department of Geography-Anthropology for the next 27 years. One of the major areas of his research was prehistoric human settlement and subsistence along the southern Maine coast and he was co-director of a project which carried out coastal archaeological surveys in and around Casco Bay.

French retired from the university in 1995 and spent the next three years as coordinator of the Maine Geographic Alliance, an organisation of which he was a charter member. He was also a judge at the Maine State Geography Bee for several years.

He also pursued his geographical passion: road maps. His interest in antique cars had led him to collect old road maps over the years, and he was fascinated by the place of these maps in American culture. Prior to the advent of the automobile, ordinary people didn’t use road maps as they had no need for them; maps were also relatively expensive. But as Americans took to the road, gasoline companies started to offer free road maps. Their cover art promoted a romance of the open road, a sense of adventure and discovery. French argued that this changed map-making and let to the democratization of cartography.

Many of his maps went on display in 2001 at an exhibition he guest-curated called “Road Maps: The American Way,” held at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education in Portland.

Several years later, he donated 4,500 road maps from his private collection to the Osher Map Library and his exhibit was put on display at Harvard University. Following the exhibits, he wrote a series of articles on roadmaps for the Roadmap Collectors’ Association.

In 2011, he self-published a novel, Road Map to Yesterday, a tale of the 1940’s involving life, love and war. The story links small town coastal Maine to people and events ranging from local scale to the broad expanse of the Pacific.

Another of French’s retirement projects was the design and building of a home in St. George, Maine, using old and new technologies. The land surrounding the home – 30 acres of spruce-fir forest and meadows – was placed in conservation with the Georges River Land Trust, part designated as wild land and part as managed forest.

Other hobbies included antique auto and bicycle restoration, hiking, fishing, tending the forest and land, and exploring Maine with his family. He was also a volunteer archivist at the Owls Head Transportation Museum which has a world-class collection of pre-1940s aircraft ane vehicles.

He leaves behind Shirley, his loving wife of 50 years, children Laura and Charles and their families including two granddaughters, Katherine and Elizabeth.

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Heidi G. Frontani

Heidi Frontani, a professor of geography at Elon University for more than 17 years, and a development geographer with particular interests in Africa, died suddenly of a heart attack on February 26, 2016, at the age of 50.

Heidi Glaesel was born on April 19, 1965, and grew up in Queens, New York. She attended Cornell University as an undergraduate, receiving a bachelor’s degree in human development.

In 1987 she participated in Harvard University Institute for International Development’s “World Teach” program. She spent 18 months at a secondary school in rural, western Kenya, teaching geography, mathematics and biology to ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade students. This experience was the start of a life-long passion for Africa.

On returning to the U.S., Frontani turned her academic attention to geography, studying at the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a master’s degree then a doctorate, but in both cases pursuing her interest in Africa. Her master’s thesis, entitled “The Masai and the Masai Mara: People, Park, and Policy,” examined the relationship between park management approach and conservation effect, particularly the extent to which participatory, bottom-up co-management can not only protect biodiversity, but also local people’s livelihoods.

In 1993 she received a university travel award to visit Kenya for research on “Resource Conservation on the Kenyan Coast: A Study in the Political Ecology of the Malindi-Watamu Biosphere Reserve.” The following year she received a Fulbright-Hayes Group Projects Abroad scholarship for intensive Swahili language training in the summer and a Foreign Language and Area Studies scholarship to study Swahili during the next academic year. This was all leading towards her doctoral fieldwork for which she received a Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship.

This field research during 1995 and 1996 involved two months in Tanzania and ten months in Kenya to investigate nearshore, indigenous marine resources. She was based at a marine conservation office but spent many weeks visiting and living with fisher people and their relatives, conducting interviews and participant-observation. She was interested in the nature and extent of an indigenous marine management system and fledgling co-management initiatives near marine protected areas, as well as documenting changes in fishing methods over time. Her dissertation, completed in 1997, was entitled “Fishers, Parks, and Power: The Socio-Environmental Dimensions of Marine Resource Decline and Protection on the Kenya Coast.” She subsequently did some comparative work with participatory fisheries management in the U.S.

Following her PhD, Frontani spent two years in Ghana teaching high school-aged kids before joining the faculty at Elon University, North Carolina, as professor of geography. Although U.S.-based, her passion for Africa continued. She broadened out from her specialist interest in fisheries and protected areas to development studies more broadly.

At Elon she taught courses including International Development, and Africans and African Development. She also contributed to Elon’s Core Curriculum, the set of courses and experiences that are shared by every undergraduate. Director of the Core Curriculum program, Jeffrey Coker said, “Heidi has been a beloved and just invaluable faculty member within the core curriculum for a long time. She has been one our best contributors to the global experience course. She has also taught core capstones that were fantastic. … Anybody that ever met Heidi would just be in awe of her passion for Africa, for her students, for teaching … She was always giving and contributing to the larger community.”

Frontani shifted much of her research focus from East Africa to West Africa. Among her published research were studies on China’s development initiatives in Ghana, the social integration of Togolese and Liberian refugees in Ghana, and Peace Corps and National Service programs in Ghana. She also published several encyclopedia entries in Oxford Bibliographies Online: African Studies and The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, as well as more than 30 book reviews on Africa, resource management, parks, development, and fisheries.

At the time of her death, she was working on two books: one on the Rockefeller Foundation’s and Wellcome Trust’s disease control and public health initiatives in the early twentieth century to several countries in Africa that were then British colonies, and another on outstanding African leaders.

As well as being a popular teacher and active scholar, Frontani held a number of leadership roles at Elon University over the years. She served as coordinator of the geography program from 1998 to 2011, chair of the Department of History and Geography from 2009 to 2012, and interim coordinator of the African and African-American Studies program from 2014 to 2015. She was the faculty adviser for Visions, Elon’s environmental magazine, and for Gamma Phi Beta, the Geography Honor Society. Recently she was also the co-chair of the implementation and assessment team for the Presidential Task Force on the Black Student, Faculty, and Staff Experiences.

Frontani recognized how strong mentors had been important to her own development and committed to being a student mentor herself. Although Elon did not offer majors in her areas of specialization of geography and African studies, she mentored students with these interests, particularly through the Periclean Scholars program, an academic service learning program which involved students in sustainable development projects, with a different country the focus each year.

She was the faculty mentor for the 2010 class of Periclean Scholars who, under her guidance and in conjunction with Ghanaian partners, built and established a health center in Kpoeta, Ghana. Charles Irons, chair of the History and Geography Department said, “She is the most effective Periclean Scholars mentor that we’ve had and has mentored students to make really profound contributions.”

In 2014, Frontani was named one of three senior faculty to be a Senior Faculty Research Fellows through the two academic school years of 2015-2016 and 2016-2017. Furthermore, in Fall 2015 she was one of seven faculty members who was named a Leadership Scholar and was involved in teaching Leadership Research.

Frontani was committed to promoting ‘development from within’ rather than development driven by outsiders’ aid and intervention. She wrote a weekly blog, African Development Successes, to share excellent initiatives that Africans are taking to make their communities, countries, and the world a better place. The aim was to counter the overly negative coverage of Africa that dominates the mass media. Her stories, which were also compiled into a searchable database, profiled a vast array of effective leaders from across the continent from up-and-coming entrepreneurs, to sports stars, to established statesmen. The blog was read by thousands of people in more than thirty countries, and the stories have been reproduced in newspapers and periodicals internationally.

Frontani became a member of the American Association of Geographers in 1999, and regularly presented papers at Annual Meetings and Regional Division conferences, as well as serving as Chair of the Research Grants Committee from 2006 to 2009. She was also a member of the African Studies Association and the Ghana Research Council.

Heidi Frontani devoted her life’s work to a deeper public understanding of the African continent and the development that spurs its progress. She will be remembered as an inspiring teacher and a tireless advocate for a shared global understanding. Leo Lambert, President of Elon University said, “We are a stronger university because of Heidi. The students she taught and mentored, and the values they carry into this world, are perhaps her greatest legacy.” Family and friends around the world will miss her greatly.

She is survived by her husband, Dr. Michael Frontani, an associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University, as well as her parents, Erika and Henry Glaesel, her sister and family, and her son, Dante.

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Kenneth White

Kenneth White, a soils geographer and fluvial geomorphologist, who spent many years at Texas A&M University and the Australian National University, passed away on February 15, 2016, at the age of 75.

Kenneth L. White, known to friends as “Kenny,” was born on October 15, 1940, in Chicago. In 1962, while working at Baxter Laboratories, he met Naomi Ellen Fletcher, who was attracted to his sense of humor, and they married in Ingleside, Illinois, the following year. By that time, White was serving in the Air Force and they immediately moved to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.

The next move was to southern California where White studied and taught at California State College at Fullerton then in the Soils Laboratory at the University of California, Riverside. He received a doctorate from there in 1976 and was immediately recruited as assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University. The head of department, Campbell White Pennington, was making a series of hiring decisions to broaden the scope of the department’s narrow cultural focus and White was brought in as a geomorphologist to strengthen the physical geography program.

White and his other new colleagues were tasked with raising undergraduate enrollments in their respective courses, White’s being Physical Geography and Thematic Cartography. These courses were taught every semester and enrollment began to grow. With his enthusiasm for soil science, students affectionately called him “Dr. Dirt.”

In the late 1970s White was tasked with developing new courses in remote sensing. He was also involved in the expanding graduate program in the department. He taught an introductory graduate class on Processes in Physical Geography and, with human geography colleague Peter Hugill, revived a graduate class in Field Geography. In the first year they took students to Arkansas but were ordered to stop spending money on trips to exotic, ‘foreign’ locations so they subsequently changed the destination to Junction, Texas!

White’s primary research interests were soil geography and fluvial geomorphology. He was particularly concerned with the micromorphology and mineralogy of soils, anaylzing their characteristics using scanning electron microscopy. He also conducted research on geomorphic landforms and landscape sculpturing processes, particularly in riverine environments. Many of his field studies were carried out in southern California and Texas. White was also an enthusiastic adopter of remote sensing, digital image processing, and GIS. Among his publications is a 1993 paper on using GIS as an educational tool.

In 1986, White moved across full-time to the Department of Geology at Texas A&M University. During that time, his research also took him to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he lived for a year.

In 1991 he was awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship. He spent the first three months in Bangladesh affiliated with the Department of Geology at the University of Dhaka. Unfortunately political unrest caused his stay in Dhaka to be shortened so he finished his scholarship in Australia at the University of Wollongong where he was based in the Department of Geography but also associated with the Faculty of Engineering.

White took to Australia a computer-based Image Processing and Geographical Information System with which to do collaborative research with faculty members and graduate students. His research aimed to identify and mitigate against natural hazards along the eastern Australia coastal strip. This involved a variety of data sources including satellite data obtained from an altitude of 500 miles, published topographic sheets at a scale of 1:25000, specific site engineering data, and other sources. He also spent time looking at fluvial chronologies, the process of fluvial avulsion, and the engineering geology problems of the east coast of Australia.

White and his wife subsequently moved more permanently to Australia and he taught at the Australian National University in Canberra for a number of years. They remained in Australia after retirement until 2003 when they decided to move back to the United States to be closer to their only granddaughter. They made their home in Mountain View, Arkansas, where they volunteered for many years at the Ozark Folk Center.

White was a member of the American Association of Geographers from 1970 to 2004. He was also a certified professional photogrammetrist and member of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, including serving as president of the Texas-Louisiana Region. In addition, he was a member of the Soil Science Society of America, the Association of Engineering Geologists, Gamma Theta Epsilon, and Sigma Xi.

After his wife’s death in 2014, White moved to Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, where he pursued his hobbies of woodwork, fishing and historic muzzle-loading firearms by joining clubs within the community. He was also involved in Christ Lutheran Church. However, his interest in topography and geoscience never diminished. A few weeks before his death, he took his family to Costa Rica where he insisted on wading into the sea so that he could climb into a fishing boat for a trip beyond the reefs.

In addition to his wife, White was preceded in death by their second daughter, Johanna Sue. He is survived by his sister, Darlene, his two children, Heidi and Kenneth Jr., and his cherished granddaughter, Kelsea Ann.

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David J. De Laubenfels

David de Laubenfels, emeritus professor in the Department of Geography at Syracuse University, and a biogeographer who was an expert on tropical conifers, passed away on February 6, 2016, at the age of 90.

David John de Laubenfels was born in 1925 in Pasadena, California. His father, Max Walker de Laubenfels, was a noted marine biologist which perhaps influenced the development of David’s interests in the natural world.

After serving in the Quartermaster Corps of the United States Army during the Second World War, de Laubenfels attended Colgate University, NY. As part of his undergraduate studies, he completed “A Geographic Study in the Hamilton Area, New York.” Having graduated in 1949 he moved to the University of Illinois for postgraduate studies. His master’s degree, completed in 1950, included a thesis entitled “Marketing Geography of Open Display Cold Storage Equipment” while his doctorate dissertation, completed in 1953, was entitled “The Temuco Region, A Geographic Study in South Central Chile.” Despite the subject matter of these three studies, he was already gravitating towards physical geography and, more particularly, to biogeography.

His first professional appointment was at the University of Georgia, starting as Assistant Professor in 1953 and moving to Associate Professor in 1958. In 1959 he joined the faculty at Syracuse University where he remained for the rest of his career, attaining the rank of full Professor in 1971 and retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1993.

De Laubenfels studied the variation of vegetation from place to place. Among his many publications in biogeography are the books A Geography of Plants and Animals (1970) and Mapping the World’s Vegetation: Regionalization of Formations and Flora (1975).

He carried out various studies in the United States, publishing articles on the soil and vegetation of New York State, the characteristics of the Ozark Upland in the Midwest, the nature and boundaries of the Corn Belt, conifers of southeast, and the semi-tropical woodland of Georgia. He also did a comparative study of Australian forests with vegetation of similar climatic areas in the Americas.

However, it is for his work on the taxonomy of conifers, particularly tropical conifers, that de Laubenfels is known throughout the world. In carrying out his studies, he traveled whenever possible to the actual locations where the plants were established so that he could see them in their many natural growth forms. He had a particular interest in the south Pacific, carrying out field expeditions to locations including New Caledonia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Moluccas. New Caledonia was of particular interest due to the rare conifers there; on one of his expeditions he discovered a parasitic conifer and published his finds in Science (1959). He also studied conifers in Latin America including Costa Rica, Venezuela, Peru and Uruguay.

His first major taxonomic revision in conifers was published in 1969: “A Revision of the Malesian and Pacific Rainforest Conifers, I Podocarpaceae.” In 1972, his chapter on “Gymnospermes” published in Flore de la Nouvelle-Caledonie et Dependances was a seminal piece of work because of the importance and uniqueness of this group of plants. Another major taxonomic publication, Coniferales, Flora Malesiana was published in 1988. Over the years, de Laubenfels identified over 100 new species in the tropics; in the photograph above he is examining Podocarpus beecherae, one of those he named. He also had one species named in his honor – Araucaria laubenfelsii, commonly known as the De Laubenfels’ araucaria – which is native to southern New Caledonia.

Outside of his taxonomic and plant geography work, de Laubenfels had a wide variety of interests on topics such as the geographic origins of human development and the origins of language. He also published a book on physics entitled It’s Hard to Believe in Infinity (1992). Meanwhile in another work, “Where Sherman Passed By” (1957), he highlighted General Sherman’s march through Georgia, walking the entire route using the maps of his great-grandfather, John (Rziha) Laube de Laubenfels, chief topographical engineer for one of Sherman’s columns.

De Laubenfels joined the American Association of Geographers in 1949 and was involved in the Regional Division that included New York State, presenting papers at regional meetings including “Plant Geography Versus Vegetation Geography” (1962) and “The Variations of Vegetation from Place to Place” (1968).

He was also a member of the American Conifer Society and British Conifer Society. His love of nature was reflected locally too: he was a long-time member of the Onondaga chapter of the Adirondack Mountain Club.

David de Laubenfels will be remembered for his major contributions to biogeography and his unparalleled expertise in tropic conifers. He had a remarkable career, with academic publications spanning from 1950 to 2015 when he was in his 90th year.

He is survived by his loving wife, Janet, three daughters, five step-children, several grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, as well as three siblings. He was predeceased by his son, Eric.

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Harold M. Rose

Harold Rose, distinguished professor emeritus of geography and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and pioneer in research on race and segregation, passed away on February 2, 2016, at the age of 86.

Harold Milton Rose was born on January 8, 1930 in Nashville, Tennessee. He was raised by his grandparents, of whom his grandfather worked in a phosphate mine and his grandmother as a domestic.

Despite skipping several grades in school, he went to college at the age of 16 – somewhat by chance – having had heard that a friend had applied to Tennessee State, a historically black college, and been accepted. Rose paid his way through his four years of college by working in the cafeteria every day.

Having graduated with a degree in history and geography in 1950, Rose spent time in the Army then returned to Tennessee State to take some further geography courses. There he was encouraged by a professor to apply for a master’s program at Ohio State University.

He taught for a few years at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, also a historically black college, before returning to Ohio State University for a doctorate in geography. His thesis, completed in 1960, was entitled “An Analysis of Land Use in Central-North Florida: A Study in Conservation.”

In 1962, Rose received a joint appointment in the departments of geography and urban affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), one of the first tenured African American professors at the university. Although he was sought by other universities, Rose spent his entire career at UWM. This included serving as chair of the Department of Urban Affairs (1970-1973 and 1974-1977), Department of Afro-American Studies (1977-1978), and Department of Geography (1990-1994).

Although Rose began his academic career exploring issues of natural resource management, he shifted focus after arriving in Milwaukee in 1962. He had moved to a deeply segregated city during a time of heightened civil rights activism around housing and school segregation. He pioneered research on the conditions faced by African Americans and went on to build a national reputation in the field, specifically how racism and racial policy affected urbanization.

Rose’s foundational work on racial discrimination and segregation challenged urban geographers to consider the ghetto as produced through both spatial and social processes. His scholarship established that examining segregation was not just about mapping the distribution of racial groups across the urban landscape, but also about understanding the social processes and attitudes about race that produced those patterns.

He conducted community-engaged research field research on the quality of life in black communities, the black ghetto, black residential mobility and interregional migration, high rates of homicide in many black communities, and the experience of blacks and Cubans in Miami.

Among his many publications on race, segregation and violence were the books “The Black ghetto: a spatial behavioral perspective” (1971), “Black Suburbanization: Access to Improved Quality of Life or Maintenance of the Status Quo?” (1976), and “Race, Place and Risk: Black Homicide in Urban America” (1990, coauthored with Paula McClain).

His academic research was driven by his passion for social justice. Aside from his scholarship, he was extensively involved in community service, from his early work with the Milwaukee Urban League to his seat on the Board of Directors for the community-based North Milwaukee State Bank.

Rose retired from UWM in 1995 as distinguished professor emeritus, after thirty-one years of teaching, pioneering scholarship, and a remarkable career of mentoring and public scholarship. The university established the Harold M. Rose Lecture series focused on race and urban social justice in tribute to his legacy to the department, the university and the discipline of geography.

Rose joined the American Association of Geographers in 1955. In 1976 he was elected its President, the first – and to date only – African American to hold that position. He used his platform to challenge urban racial segregation and discrimination. His presidential address entitled “Geographies of Despair” (subsequently published in the Annals of the AAG in 1978) voiced the need to expand research into the experiences of African Americans.

In 1996 Rose was awarded the AAG’s Lifetime Achievement Honor and in 2012 an award was created in his name – the Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racist and Practice in Geography – to honor geographers who have advanced the discipline through their research on racism, and who have also had on impact on anti-racist practice. To date the award has been given to Donald Deskins, Jr. (2013), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2014), and Bobby Wilson (2015).

With the passing of Harold Rose, geography has lost an extraordinarily important figure. His research made significant contributions to geographic understandings of segregation and racism as a socio-spatial process. His work was courageous in challenging racism at a time when very few in geography even acknowledged racism and its consequences. He was also an exemplar of how scholars can go beyond theoretical understandings of social practices to engage actual communities and to make a difference in human life. Rose regretted that his life required him to be consumed with issues of race, but he knew that to be less involved was ‘simply not possible.’

Harold Rose was humble, kind and generous. He will be fondly remembered by many former colleagues and students at UWM and across the United States. He is survived by his lovingly wife of 60 years, Ann Louise, their son, Gregory, a granddaughter and three great-grandchildren.

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Susan R. Brooker-Gross

Susan Brooker-Gross, who spent almost 40 years at Virginia Tech, first in the geography department then in university administration, passed away suddenly on January 2, 2016, at the age of 65, due to complications after surgery.

Susan Ruth Gross was born in 1950 in Ohio. She was intellectually precocious and, after excelling in the Lake School District, she attended Bowling Green State University, where she earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in geography.

Having graduated in 1973, she moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to pursue a doctorate, also in geography. Her thesis, completed in 1977, was entitled “Spatial Organization of the News Wire Services in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” Looking at the new technology of the telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century, she examined how the expansion of physical infrastructure brought about socio-cultural change, from a focus on local communities to a nationally integrated society. Aspects of her thesis were subsequently published and she continued her interest in the geography of news media throughout her career, publishing articles and chapters on topics ranging from 19th century newspapers to 24-hour global TV news.

Brooker-Gross joined the faculty at Virginia Tech in 1977 as an assistant professor of geography. She was promoted to associate professor in 1983 and chaired the geography department from 1990 to 1993. Geography professor and longtime colleague Jim Campbell said, “Susan, as one of our department’s early faculty members, was a major contributor to our growth and stature at the university.”

Her research centered on urban geography, and explored the impact of gender, technology, and socioeconomic factors on human populations. A particular strand of her work was commuting in non-metropolitan areas and the impact of employment on the household, for example finding child care in rural areas. Much of her field research looked at the area around Blacksburg, Virginia, where she lived, and specifically at households with university employees.

Over time, Brooker-Gross’s interests turned to the administrative aspects of higher education. In 1993, she moved from the geography department to the provost’s office. She started as associate provost for undergraduate programs and became deeply involved with the transition of student records to electronic formats. This work put her into contact with planners and developers in information technology, and in 1997, she joined the Division of Information Technology.

Her first role was as the student systems implementation leader for Banner, the university’s comprehensive application for managing student and personnel information. She later became the Director of Policy and Communications and was responsible for planning news and communications for the Division of Information Technology, as well as developing many of the policies that govern the university’s data access, maintenance, and security.

Her sharp intellect and broad experience at the university made her a valuable administration and planning asset for the division and her contributions to the university will be greatly missed. John Krallman, director of information and technology business and financial affairs said, “She was deeply intellectual, and had a way of thinking about problems that was truly different. Her consideration of IT challenges often yielded better, more thorough solutions than we could otherwise have provided, and we relied on her innovative approach, as well as her skill as a writer and editor.”

Brooker-Gross was a lifetime member of the American Association of Geographers, and actively involved in the Southeast Regional Division including serving as its President. She was also active in her home community of Blacksburg. Together with her husband, they built and then inhabited a winsome homestead in the Blacksburg countryside. In 2001, she decided to learn the flute, and quickly showed sufficient skill to join the Blacksburg Community Band, with whom she thoroughly enjoyed rehearsing and performing.

Susan will be fondly remembered by many friends and neighbors in Blacksburg, as well as colleagues at Virginia Tech. She was predeceased by her husband of 35 years, James E. Brooker, who died in May 2015. She is survived by their son, John Brooker, and her brother, Jeffrey.

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Harry “Hal” Bowman

Hal Bowman, a GIS professional and geography graduate of both Johns Hopkins University and The Ohio State University, was among the 14 people killed in the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, on December 2, 2015. He was 46 years old.

Harry Albert Bowman was born on June 8, 1969, and grew up in Jacobus, York County, Pennsylvania. He attended Dallastown Area High School where he was a National Merit Scholar and graduated second in his class of 1987. He was also involved in cross country and was a stalwart of the school debate team for several years.

Bowman then attended The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, studying for a BA in geography followed by a MA in geography and environmental engineering, graduating with honors in 1991. He was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity where he served as Community Services chair and was remembered for his charitable efforts including participating in dance marathons and bouncing basketballs for cause fundraisers, and helping at soup kitchens.

In 1993 Bowman moved to The Ohio State University for doctoral studies. Supervised by Morton O’Kelly, he produced a thesis entitled “Optimizing Transportation Infrastructure Improvements for Networks under The Threat of Natural Hazards.” His work concerned retrofitting bridges to improve their resilience to earthquake damage. O’Kelly noted that Bowman worked extremely efficiently to complete an excellent dissertation; he also remembered him as “a special guy” who “had lots of great ideas.”

Having completed his PhD in 1995 he moved to California to work at Esri, establishing himself as a GIS programmer and analyst. He was subsequently appointed as one of the first employees at a new counter-terrorism center at the University of Southern California: the Center for Risk Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE).

CREATE was the first Department of Homeland Security University Center of Excellence, established after the 9/11 attacks. Bowman’s expertise in software, mapping and spatial datasets was applied to evaluating the risk and economic impact of national security threats and terrorist events in order to guide authorities in their planning and decision making. He contributed to many of CREATE’s early projects, including the Risk Analysis Workbench, emergency medical supply distribution software, and a counter-terrorism modeling framework.

In September 2015, just two months before his untimely death, Bowman started a new job as a statistical analyst for Healthy Communities for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health. He was attending the holiday party for county employees at the Inland Regional Center when a co-worker and his wife entered the room and opened fire.

Bowman had two daughters, aged 15 and 11. He was a devoted father who considered their education of upmost importance, developing their knowledge and curiosity thorough at-home science experiments, summer educational programs, trips to the library, and countless visits to museums of all kinds, as well as helping with homework.

Bowman also loved the outdoors, spending much of his free time hiking. He loved the national parks and intended to volunteer when he retired. He was also a dedicated member of the Roman Catholic Church, and had been involved in teaching confirmation classes.

Friends and former classmates remember Hal Bowman as being intelligent and full of ideas, as well as a good man and a gentle soul. In addition to his two daughters, he is survived by his mother, his brother and sister and their families.

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Victor Winston

Victor Winston, founder of Bellwether Publishing, which published leading geography journals for over 50 years, passed away on November 23, 2015, aged 90.

Victor Henry Winston was born in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) on February 22, 1925. He belonged to a vibrant Jewish community which was subsequently destroyed in the Holocaust. A week before the Germans marched into Vilna in June 1941 the Russians arrested the Winston family for Zionist activities. 16-year-old Victor was sent to Siberia where he spent four years in jails and concentration camps.

Having survived his incarceration and the war, Winston left in 1946 for the United States, where he earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree at Columbia University in New York.

During the Korean War he was drafted into the US army and assigned to the Central Intelligence Agency. He was then transferred to the Mid European Center of Radio Free Europe, where he became its coordinator of research and later acting head.

In the 1950s, Winston taught at the Army War College before founding his own publishing house, Bellwether Publishing in 1959, headquartered in Columbia, Maryland. Concurrent with his leadership of Bellwether, Winston also served as Adjunct Professor of International Affairs at George Mason University, Virginia. In the 1990s he moved to Palm Beach, Florida, from where he maintained a branch office of Bellwether. In later years he also served as a Visiting Professor of International Affairs at Marshall University, West Virginia.

Much of Winston’s academic scholarship drew on his own heritage and experiences including the city of Vilnius during the war years and the deportation of Soviet Jews. He also wrote about economic and political developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including the economic geography of countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and reflections on the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s. As well as journal articles, he co-edited a book with Ed A. Hewett titled Milestones in Glasnost’ and Perestroyka, with one volume on ‘Politics and People’ and another on ‘The Economy’ (The Brookings Institution, 1991).

Bellwether Publishing started small but later branched out to New York and London, and the publication of some 45 scholarly journals. Winston later sold the major portion of his business but continued with a similar, smaller firm focused on five highly-respected geography journals: Eurasian Geography and Economics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Urban Geography, Physical Geography, and GIScience & Remote Sensing.

All of these journals became – and remain – important and prestigious outlets for different parts of geography, and have shaped the intellectual trajectory of the discipline over several decades.

Two of the titles grew from Winston’s own interests. Soviet Geography: Review and Translation, which he founded in 1960, was a groundbreaking journal whose aim was “to make available in English reports of current Soviet research in geography.” It subsequently was renamed Post-Soviet Geography (1992-1995), then Post-Soviet Geography and Economics (1996-2002), until taking its current title of Eurasian Geography and Economics in 2002 with a wider remit of publishing original papers on geographic and economic issues across Russia, China, India, the European Union, and other regions within the Eurasian realm. It has achieved the status of being one of the highest ranked journals in Area Studies.

In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Bellwether started to publish Soviet Economy. It aimed to present research results and analytical observations on the profound transition taking place in the Soviet Union. By 1987, when the nexus between economics and politics became the focus of some very interesting research, the journal started to publish seminal papers in political science and contemporary history. It was renamed Post-Soviet Affairs in 1992 and continued to offer important research and analysis on the reform process. Today it still publishes contemporary papers on the state of the economy and society in the republics of the former Soviet Union.

In 1980 Winston founded two new journals: Urban Geography and Physical Geography. For the last 35 years, Urban Geography has published original papers on problem-oriented research by geographers and other social scientists on urban policy; race, poverty, and ethnicity in the city; international differences in urban form and function; historic preservation; the urban housing market; and provision of services and urban economic activity. Meanwhile Physical Geography has been an important central place for publishing research on topics of the sub-discipline including geomorphology, climatology, soil science, and biogeography, as well as research methods. In recent years it has embraced the work of physical geographers at the human-environment interface and also publishes cross-cutting research in physical geography.

The fifth of Winston’s journals was Mapping Sciences and Remote Sensing, published from 1964. It was renamed GIScience & Remote Sensing in 2004 and now publishes basic and applied research on cartography, geographic information systems, remote sensing of the environment (including digital image processing), geocomputation, spatial data mining, spatial statistics, and geographic environmental modeling.

Winston’s hope was that through sharing geographic research he would foster collaborations across international and topical borders. He came to know the literature of each sub-discipline well, including the contributors, editors, and editorial boards. He was a hands-on manager, working tirelessly behind the scenes to maintain the quality and viability of each of his titles. He devoted substantial time and resources to ensuring that each journal flourished, overseeing processing of papers, printing, and distribution.

Over more than 30 years, the five journals combined published more than 3,000 refereed geography papers. At a time when the publishing industry was becoming increasingly dominated by large, impersonal corporations with agendas occasionally at odds from that of academia, Bellwether retained an important, more personalized, and specialized niche outlet. For his efforts, Winston earned the widespread respect and indebtedness of geographers the world over.

In 2013, Routledge/Taylor & Francis took on the five journals. Winston was greatly encouraged by this new publishing home for Bellwether, which could no longer cope successfully with the massive changes ushered in by Open Access, the proliferation of consortia, and other such developments. He was also delighted that this would also make the journals accessible to thousands of libraries and institutions around the world.

Winston supported the efforts of the AAG for more than half a century and was among the longest-serving members and mentors of the Russian, Central Eurasian and East European Specialty Group. In addition, he and the staff at Bellwether were active in other AAG specialty groups associated with the topics of the journals. Winston also served as the AAG Representative on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

In 2010, Winston and Bellwether Publishing received the AAG’s prestigious Publication Award, conferred in recognition of exceptional and outstanding contributions to the discipline by publishers. This honor recognized his many years of service as a rare combination of scholar and publisher, and in recognition of more than 50 years of sustained support for the discipline of geography through production of outstanding geography journals.

Jeremy Tasch, Chair of the AAG’s Russian, Central Eurasian and East European Specialty Group said: “Victor’s efforts to shape the intellectual development of our discipline are celebrated. But his heartfelt recollections of Lithuania, and his personal involvement in the lives of so many geographers, will be missed.”

Victor Winston is survived by his wife, Belle (nee Jaroslaw); their sons, Edward and Robert; and grandsons, Henry and Benjamin.

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Shiloh Sundstrom

Shiloh Sundstrom, a doctoral student and teaching assistant in the Department of Geography at Oregon State University, and a keen rancher, forester and conservationist, was tragically killed in a hit-and-run accident near Corvallis on November 22, 2015. He was 34.

Shiloh Forest Sundstrom was born in 1981 on Rock Creek Ranch in Deadwood, Oregon, which lies on the edge of Siuslaw National Forest between Eugene and the Pacific coast. As a farm boy, he enjoyed spending time with animals, particularly horses and cows, and became very knowledgeable about the area.

Sundstrom attended school in nearby Mapleton where he also enjoyed sports, particularly athletics, and was the Class of 2000 valedictorian. He then attended Brandeis University in Massachusetts, studying history with a minor in environmental studies, as well as running for the cross-country and track teams. During his time as an undergraduate, he spent a semester abroad at the School for Field Studies in Kenya, where the land and the people made a huge impression on him.

Having graduated with honors, Sundstrom continued with his studies. At Oregon State University, he gained a master’s degree in forestry then moved to the geography department as a doctoral candidate to pursue his interests in Kenya, specifically the livestock-herding Maasai people. His work investigated the challenges facing Maasai communities and their struggles to maintain traditional culture while adapting to modern pressures and opportunities.

During his first period of doctoral field research in 2014, he spent 5 months in southern Kenya examining the role of community-based conservation and development organizations in helping the Maasai to conserve their land and benefit from wildlife conservation and tourism enterprises. Although he returned with a rich set of data from interviews, he felt that he had much more to learn in order to tell a more complete story about the challenges and opportunities faced by the Maasai.

He returned to Kenya in Spring 2015 to learn more about the role that livestock continues to play in the Maasai’s cultural identity, their efforts to ensure that livestock production remains viable in the twenty-first century, the government policies of privatizing communal lands and settling the Maasai, and the challenges to pastoralism and wildlife conservation from the exploration for oil.

Because of his own deep ties to the land and his long involvement with community-based conservation in the US, Sundstrom was in a very special position to conduct this research, connecting theory and practice, and producing scholarship that demonstrated that conservation and livelihoods can go hand in hand.

Hannah Gosnell, associate professor at OSU and Sundstrom’s doctoral adviser, said that he was “an invaluable bridge between two worlds…interested in the challenge of conserving wildlife while maintaining traditional pastoral life ways – a challenge we have here in the West, too.”

Sundstrom was a student member of the American Association of Geographers and due to present a paper on his doctoral research at the 2016 Annual Meeting in San Francisco entitled “Redefining Conservation without Parks in Kenya’s Maasailand.”

He was working on his dissertation at the time of his death and his work will be continued, published, and used for the good it was intended to document and perpetuate. The university has also set up a memorial scholarship fund in his name to help OSU graduate students in geography and forest ecosystems and society who are engaged in research on conservation and livelihoods in rural communities.

However, Sundstrom was much more than a geography student. He was the cattle manager at the family’s Rock Creek Ranch and worked on its forest management projects. He had worked for the Siuslaw Watershed Council and was a conservationist and program director at the Siuslaw Institute in the Siuslaw National Forest. He was also a vocal advocate for more sustainable policies and practices for working landscapes, and was involved in the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition (RVCC), a network of organizations working on conservation-based community and economic challenges facing the rural West.

Gosnell said, “He was able to navigate comfortably between the halls of academia, theorizing about the political ecology of public lands ranching in the West, and the day-to-day realities and constraints of life on the farm… He was well on his way to becoming an important leader, like his father, in thinking about alternative, more resilient futures for our working landscapes.”

Maia Enzer, who worked with Sundstrom when she was director of RVCC, said that he was part of “a new generation of conservation leaders who are grounded in place—in the rural places they were born and raised—and fully see that the future relies on integrated solutions.”

Sundstrom was driven by dreams of a better world for people and nature, and for a balance between protection and productivity. He was articulate and passionate about the future of rural communities, and a budding leader in the field of community-based conservation who could talk knowledgeably and passionately with environmentalists, agency administrators, and congressional staff alike.

Shiloh Sundstrom will be remembered for his enthusiasm and positive energy, his warmth and gentle demeanor, his generosity and creativity. He will be greatly missed from the tight-knit community of Deadwood to the vast savanna of Kenya. He is survived by his parents, Johnny and Tchanan; his sister, Danell, her partner and their young daughter; and his girlfriend, Rachael.

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Michael Harrison

Mike Harrison, a geographer with broad interests across physical geography and environmental studies, passed away on November 21, 2015, at the age of 55.

John Michael Harrison completed his bachelor’s degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute followed by a master’s degree at the University of Georgia.

He then moved to the University of Florida for doctoral studies, funded by the National Science Foundation and under the supervision of Peter Waylen. His thesis, entitled “The Modeling of Daily Precipitation in Costa Rica,” examined the means by which daily precipitation in Costa Rica could be modeled, and how the El Nino-Southern Oscillation affected precipitation-generating mechanisms.

Harrison distinguished himself in a series of tenure-track and tenured faculty positions, first as Professor of Geography at the University of Southern Mississippi then as Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Richmond. There he played a major role in creating the Environmental Studies Program, designing its curriculum, establishing facilities to support GIS, and recruiting those faculty members who now lead the effort.

He then moved to the Political Science and Geography Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio. During his time there he was honored with a Distinguished Teaching Award from the National Council for Geographic Education. More recently he moved back to live in Virginia and work as an Independent Scholar.

Harrison worked across various sub-fields of the discipline including physical geography, climatology, Latin American studies, mathematical modeling, GIS and remote sensing.

His presentations at the AAG Annual Meeting over recent years give a flavour of his broad-based interests: using remote sensing techniques to assess the rapid growth of the greater Las Vegas region; applying GIS analysis to examine relationships between rabies incidence and inter-annual climate variability; running models of the winds associated with the El Nino-Southern Oscillation to assess whether Polynesians could have travelled from Easter Island to South America; and a GIS analysis of how renaming a road in Atlanta after Martin Luther King affected socio-economic conditions.

Harrison was a long-time member of the AAG and particularly involved in the Southeast Division (SEDAAG). He held various service positions in SEDAAG and served on the Editorial Board of The Southeastern Geographer. He was also a member of the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

Beyond his professional accomplishments, Harrison will be remembered as a thoughtful and giving colleague, and will be greatly missed. He is survived by his wife, Kathy Pendleton Harrison, as well as his mother, brother and sister.

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