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NSF Announces Transdisciplinary Track in HEGS Program

The Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences (HEGS) program at the U.S. National Science Foundation has published a new solicitation (NSF 25-507). Proposals submitted after October 1, 2024 should follow the new solicitation.

HEGS supports basic scientific research about the nature, causes, consequences or evolution of evolution of the spatial dimensions of human behaviors, activities, and dynamics as well as their interactions with environmental and social processes across a range of scales. The new program solicitation welcomes proposals that address these issues with empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, methodologically rigorous, and generalizable research that advances geographical and geospatial sciences.

Competitive HEGS proposals should advance fundamental geographic theory and geospatial methods with rationale to support the falsifiability of hypotheses, clear and rigorous sampling and analytical methodology, establishing validity, and generalizability to broader contexts. Regular HEGS awards range from $100,000 to $500,000, inclusive of indirect costs. Budgets must be commensurate with proposed activities and must directly support the objectives of the research. Budgets above $500,000 may sometimes be possible for proposals that are co-reviewed with other NSF programs. Prospective PIs are encouraged to contact non-HEGS program directors to discuss co-review possibilities and programmatic fit. Budget requests are reviewed carefully at all stages of the evaluation process, and proposals with budgets that are justified and appropriate to the scope of the project are prioritized. Submitters of proposals are encouraged to consult the NSF awards database for perspective on the range of budget requests that characterize the program.

A new track for proposals, Transdisciplinary REsearch in Environmental Social Science (TREES), provides funding to support research that integrates social science and environmental science to advance social sciences in understanding the complex interactions between people and the environment. TREES proposals submitted to HEGS should fuse multi-disciplinary perspectives, theories, and methods to advance the science of socioenvironmental systems and basic human-environmental and geographical sciences.TREES awards are expected to be 3–4 years in the range of $200,000–$250,000 per year.

If PIs are uncertain of the fit of a prospective project for the HEGS program (or other NSF programs), they may send a concept outline of 1 to 2 pages describing 1) the research questions and objectives, 2) theoretical foundations, 3) data collection plans, including sampling considerations, 4) analytical plans, and 5) the anticipated budget request to HEGS Program Directors (HEGS-info@nsf.gov).

HEGS depends on the willingness of qualified reviewers to provide helpful advice to NSF program directors on the merits of the proposals and constructive comments for PIs to improve their projects. Reviewers also benefit from gaining first-hand knowledge of the peer review process, learning about common problems with proposals, discovering strategies to write strong proposals, and, if serving on a panel, having dynamic and insightful discussions with other reviewers. Anyone interested in reviewing HEGS proposals please email HEGS Program Directors (HEGS-info@nsf.gov) with a short bio and a CV.

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Robert “Bob” Moline

The daily work rhythms Robert “Bob” Moline observed for nearly 40 years reflected a passion for landscape, weather, culture, and thinking about the human place in the environment. After teaching his 8:00 am meteorology class, Bob took his daily run through the prairie and forested landscapes of the campus arboretum. Then, it was time to print and post the daily upper air and surface weather charts, teach another class or two, followed by late afternoons spent listening to jazz at high volume while organizing his slide carousels for the next day. Bob Moline was a beloved professor and colleague and the guiding force in building both the geography and environmental studies programs at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. Although he passed away in January 2024, his influence continues to be felt through the thousands of people he inspired to pay careful attention to the skies, to the landscape, and to their place in the region and river basin.

Bob Moline, was born in Gary, Indiana and grew up on the Southside of Chicago where his dad was pastor of Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church. Bob graduated from Chicago’s Hirsch High School in 1951 and entered Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, where he majored in science and met his future wife, Janet Reedquist. After college he served in the Air Force from 1955-1959 as an instructor in the weather training program at Chanute Air Base in Illinois and then at Etain, France, where he taught meteorology and held the post of Chief Weather Observer. The experiences in the Air Force prompted Bob to pursue a career in teaching. When he and Janet returned to the United States, he began graduate work in geography at the University of Illinois.

As Bob was finishing his master’s degree in 1961, Gustavus Adolphus College was in the process of establishing a geography program. Bob’s alma mater, Augustana College, had established its geography program in 1949. Like Gustavus, it was affiliated with the Swedish-American Lutheran Church. A telephone call between the deans at Gustavus and Augustana identified Bob as a likely candidate, and an interview at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago led to a job offer. Soon Bob and Janet Moline were on their way to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, where he would spend the next 37 years teaching full-time, raising two children (Jeff Moline and Karen Wallin) and living out the remainder of their lives until Janet died in 1999.   For most of the years since that time Bob remained in St. Peter with his new wife Kay.

Sharing the basement of Old Main and later the Nobel Hall of Science with the lone geologist, Bob Moline set about building the geography department while working on his Ph.D. in geography at the University of Minnesota. Under the supervision of University of California-Berkeley-trained Ward Barrett, Bob completed his dissertation in 1969 on agricultural drainage of wetlands and shallow lakes entitled, “The Modification of the Wet Prairie in Southern Minnesota.”  This work led to two published monographs on public attitudes in water resources management. Bob’s long-term research passion was to update Jan Broek’s classic 1932 study of landscape evolution in California’s Santa Clara Valley to document the transition from prunes and cherries to microprocessors and computer software.

Bob’s teaching portfolio reflected his diverse interests: Meteorology, Water Resources, Cultural Geography, The American West, and a course whose title reflected the questions he cared most about: Environmental Attitudes and Landscape Change. Bob knew well the value of maps and the importance of field experiences. He curated the map collection at Gustavus Adolphus College, one of the largest map libraries in the country at a liberal arts college. Between 1974 and 1998 he led an annual January Term field course titled San Francisco: The City and Its Region. To bring the expansive western landscape into the classroom, Bob shot his photographs in side-by-side mode and equipped his classroom with side-by-side slide projectors operated in tandem. In recognition of his excellence in the classroom, Gustavus awarded Bob with the college’s Distinguished Teacher Award in 1987. In presenting the teaching award, a faculty colleague described Bob as evincing “enthusiasm from the heart, commitment to the land, and deep care for students.”

Bob Moline put his geographic expertise into practice by running a regional rain gauge network with local farmers and serving on the Minnesota state power plant siting committee, the River Bend regional planning organization, the Minnesota Water Resources Board, and the City of St. Peter Planning Commission. In the preamble to the city’s 1995 comprehensive plan Bob managed to quote Lewis Mumford, Michael Sorkin, and James Howard Kunstler.

Bob’s geographical fascination never wavered. He seemed to never not be a practicing geographer. His love of places and his deeply ingrained sense of the world as landscape were constants throughout his life. His family vacations, often road trips to the American West, were geographical field trips. Visitors to his house were met with walls covered in maps, each with beloved stories. Who could have much patience for faculty meetings when, out there, the landscape, even the most mundane, was waiting to be explored? Bob Moline’s legacy of service and endless geographic curiosity lives on through his many former students who have found positions in university geography departments, high school geography classrooms, city planning departments, and water resources agencies across the country. Bob is survived by his brother Norm Moline, professor emeritus of geography at Augustana College (Rock Island, Illinois), his spouse Kay, and children Jeff, Karen, and their families.

This memorial was prepared by former colleagues and family members Mark Bjelland, Robert Douglas, Jeff Moline, Norm Moline, and Anna Versluis.

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Victor Gregor Limon

By Emily Frisan

Education: Master’s in Urban & Regional Planning, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Bachelor of Science in Geography, University of the Philippines, Diliman

Past Experiences: GIS Analyst, Ecological Determinants Lab at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa; Cartographer, An Atlas of West Maui; Technical Staff, National Anti-Poverty Commission, Republic of the Philippines

Researching Unique Spatialities

Victor Gregor Limon got his start in data analysis, after graduating from his undergraduate degree in the Philippines. Working with the country’s National Anti-Poverty Commission, he helped inform poverty reduction policies, measures, and strategies at the national level. Throughout his master’s program at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Limon worked in the Ecological Determinants Lab as a GIS Analyst to evaluate the County of Honolulu’s “Housing First” program. His work evaluating data informed the organization to identify opportunities which “allowed homeless individuals to receive housing without requiring them to go through honors, like requirements or processes, and just housing them first because that’s what they need.” Now Limon’s research in the lab encompasses evaluating social and built environments, local policies, and cultural influences on the health and well-being of adolescents and adults.

His experience working with the city and county offered Limon experience in municipal government, which opened up an opportunity for him to join the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability, and Resiliency of the City and County of Honolulu as a data analyst. He now provides support to Honolulu’s energy, adaptation, hazard mitigation, and policy programs, while maintaining its Annual Sustainability Report, greenhouse gas inventory, tree plantings map, and other data resources.

Climate change’s impacts vary by place and neighborhood, says Limon. In Hawaii, especially, there are many microclimates, and spatial variations can be very marked, with wild contrasts: “It’s important to figure out that the climate impacts vary by place and the people who live in those places.”

 

Finding Oneself in Geography

Whether working with climate or health data, Limon’s work acknowledges how “not all places and not all groups of people are the same.” His master’s thesis examined the spatial variation of COVID-19 prevalence and infection rates, focused on the pandemic’s impact on Native Hawaiians and residents of Honolulu. Historical, long-standing inequalities have disrupted the ability to obtain reliable and targeted public health data on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, but “geography was very useful in figuring out why certain places, certain groups of people are more vulnerable than others. Geography was really the perfect tool to answer that question.”

When considering what else his future could hold, Limon doesn’t know what he would have been if he hadn’t discovered geography. “I would have been a totally different person with totally different skills, and I would have qualified for a totally different job,” he said. “Geography was instrumental in giving me the skills to figure out why there are changes. Why places are different. Why people are different and figuring out what causes those differences.”

Learn more about what a degree in geography can do for you by reading more AAG Career Profiles and discover the resources we offer for your professional development journey.

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Philip W. Porter

We mourn the passing of, but also celebrate the life of, Philip (Phil) Wayland Porter, a stalwart member of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography between 1958 and 2000. Phil died in Hanover, New Hampshire on April 24, 2024, just two miles from the place of his birth, surrounded by his family (predeceased by his lifelong life partner Patricia Garrigus Porter in December 2021).

Phil was born on July 9, 1928, in Hanover, the son of Wayland R. and Bertha (La Plante) Porter. He graduated from Kimball Union Academy in 1946, where his father taught mathematics and physics and his mother was a librarian. He then earned his A.B. in Geography at Middlebury College in 1950 (where he also was on the ski-jumping team), his M.A. at Syracuse University in 1955 (after two years in the U.S. Army, 1952-4), and his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 1956 (“Population Distribution and Land-use in Liberia”). He immediately joined the University of Minnesota department as an instructor, then assistant professor, advancing to associate professor in 1964 and professor in 1966. He chaired the Department of Geography (1969-71), directed the University’s Office of International Programs (1979-83), served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Space Programs for Earth Observations (1967-1971) and was a liaison officer for Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities (1979-1983).

Phil’s first and enduring scholarly commitment was to understanding Indigenous agricultural practices in east Africa, undertaking career-long ethnographic fieldwork, initially with anthropologists, that began with Walter Goldschmidt’s Culture and Ecology in East Africa Project (1961-2). He taught at the University of Dar Es Salaam for two years (1971-73), overlapping with members of the influential The Dar es Salaam School of African History, introducing his daughters to rural African life through many trips in their Land Rover. This scholarship was summarized in two monographs: Food and Development in the Semi-arid Zone of East Africa (Syracuse: 1979) and Challenging Nature: Local Knowledge, Agroscience, and Food Security in Tanga Region, Tanzania (Chicago: 2006). In recognition, he received the inaugural Robert McC. Netting Award from the AAG Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group in 1999. His quiet but firm personal and intellectual support was vital for those students seeking to make a better world.

Phil’s interests in geography ranged far and wide. He was intrigued with John K. Wright and the geography of ideas. He was a passionate and innovative cartographer. Among his many published articles, he wrote on economic potentials, the point of minimum aggregate travel, the impact of climate on human activity, human ecology and agro-ecological modeling. During the last three decades of his career, he became particularly interested in critical development studies. This began with an AAG Resource Paper with Anthony de Souza, “The Underdevelopment and Modernization of the Third World” (AAG: 1974), was deepened through his annual undergraduate course on development, and culminated in the textbook A World of Difference (Guilford: 1998, 2008, with Eric Sheppard, Richa Nagar and David Faust). Former colleagues and advisors have described him as a “towering scholar”, “one of the most amazing polymaths and ‘renaissance men’ I’ve ever met”, “incredibly gracious”, and “genuinely curious rather than threatened by new ideas.”

Phil was a quietly reliable anchor of the department, with the capacity to talk with anyone and a puckish sense of humor. His students adored him, graduate and undergraduate alike, queueing outside his office to seek out his wisdom and bathe in his invariable support. He developed an innovative introductory course, in which students were asked to rotate the globe to a new north pole of their own choosing and tasked as teams to produce and rationalize an atlas reconstructing its human and physical geography of this hypothetical globe. The course on “Third World Underdevelopment and Modernization” was similarly made unforgettable by Phil’s extraordinary teaching style. David Faust, who had a chance to serve as a TA and co-instructor for this course, recalls:

“One day Phil would walk into the classroom and remark, ‘I want to show you something from one of my ancestors. Pay careful attention, because this is from one of your ancestors, too.’ He would hold out what appeared to be an ordinary rock. ‘This is a hand axe. You hold it like this. Try it.’ And he would pass it around. Another day he would enter the class carrying a rickety wooden turntable and a couple of bricks. He would ask for a volunteer to stand on the turntable, take a brick in each hand and be spun, extending their arms to make the spinning slow, and bringing them close to their chest to speed up the spinning, just as a figure skater does. This was to demonstrate conservation of angular momentum as part of a lesson about atmospheric circulation.”

Regents Professor Emeritus Eric Sheppard, lead author of this memorial, recalls:

“I first met Phil when I interviewed for the position at Minnesota in 1976. I had no idea who he was when I arrived; a young, overconfident quantitative turk. The only names familiar to me were Fred Lukermann, John Adams and Yifu Tuan, I was here to transform the department. Prior to my talk, the graduate students took me out for a liquid lunch at what was then Bulwinkles, after which I was put in the chair’s office to prep my presentation on geographic potentials (the topic of my Ph.D.). Idly leafing through old copies of the Annals, I was shocked & disconcerted to find a paper authored by Phil and Fred on … geographic potentials. Needless to say, this was a bit embarrassing. I managed to get through the talk with both Phil or Fred being nice enough not to mention their paper (which I had not read; my article on this topic also appeared in the Annals a couple of years later, after it had been rejected and my advisor had prevailed on the editor, John C. Hudson, to change his mind). In the end it was the department that transformed me, and Phil played a key role. I spent the last decade of my career doing the same kind of qualitative research that characterized his lifelong scholarship.”

Former Ph.D. advisee Richa Nagar notes: “Phil played a major role in molding me as a learner, an educator, and a human, and he taught me to better appreciate the unpredictable poetry of the world we live in.” She recalls a moving incident from Fall 1990:

“Phil’s class on ‘Geography of Africa’ inspired me to undertake a directed study with him on the history of Asian communities in East Africa. That same quarter, I also committed to a two-quarter long course sequence in ‘Historical Sociology’ with Ron Aminzade and Barbara Laslett, who required the students to study primary research documents during the second quarter. I came across an article with a footnote which stated that Robert Gregory, a retired professor at Syracuse University, had boxes full of interviews that his students had conducted with Asians in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in the 1970s. I shared my wish with Phil in our directed study meeting, ‘I would’ve loved to examine those interviews for my Historical Sociology assignment.’ A week later I found a check from him in my department mailbox. It had a Post-it note: ‘Go book your plane ticket to Syracuse and read those interviews.’ I went to Phil in disbelief and asked why he had given me the check. He said, ‘I have some research money but your research is more important at this time. This is your Christmas present.’”

The annual Christmas parties, hosted by Phil and his wife Pat, were the major departmental social event of the year drawing almost everyone to feast and even sing carols, irrespective of their religious affiliations. His annual party invitations were also legendary; each year he would pick a letter of the alphabet, plumb his well-thumbed dictionary, and write a page-long invite using words only beginning with that letter.

Phil’s other abiding passion was music, particularly choral music by J.S. Bach. He regularly sang and performed with Pat, organist and choir director at Minneapolis’ First Congregational Church (1957-1971) and then Grace University Lutheran Church (1976-2000). In choirs, the other basses competed to sit nearby so that they could rely on his ability to read music and sing the right notes. After retirement, Phil and Pat returned to New Hampshire, where their lives alternated between scholarly senior living near Dartmouth College, and summers in the sprawling family cottage on Lake Sunapee. He is survived by three daughters, Janet E. Holmén, Sara L. Porter, and Alice C. Porter, as well as five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

This memorial was contributed by Eric Sheppard, Richa Nagar, and Abdi Samatar on behalf of the Department of Geography, Environment, & Society, University of Minnesota.

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