When MSEM students return to the USF campus this Fall, we’ll be offering three Special Topics courses in addition to those required for first-year students and several we regularly feature. Special Topics courses underscore our commitment to providing an interdisciplinary education that integrates environmental science and engineering with policy and management knowledge, so our graduates are well-equipped to provide science-based management strategies for the environmental challenges the world faces.
A sneak peek at the new additions to this Fall’s lineup:
Python Programming for GIS with Professor Paul Nesbit
This course will provide a comprehensive introduction to Python programming specifically tailored for automation and customization within Geographic Information Systems (GIS) frameworks. Students will gain foundational technical skills that are highly sought after in the geospatial workforce and research labs, with an emphasis on automating workflows and creating customized geospatial analysis tools across a wide range of geospatial datasets. No prior programming experience is necessary, and the fundamentals students will learn in this course are applicable beyond GIS – to web development, application programming, and open-source environments.
taught by Professor Paul Nesbit in USF’s GsAL
Professor Paul Nesbit, PhD is a full-time faculty member whose research interests are at the intersection of modern digital geospatial technologies and environmental mapping with broader aims of understanding fundamental environmental and geospatial challenges.
GIS for Water Management with Professor Chris Lowrie
Designed to introduce topics related to water resources management, this course will teach students how to harness GIS and models to delineate and study how water moves through systems. This course will help students develop analytical skills to run and evaluate output from freely available hydrologic models for watersheds in California, and no prior modeling experience is necessary. Students will use a combination of industry standard software to complete a series of real-world environmental projects.
Professor Chris Lowrie is a practitioner instructor and a Climate Solutions Engineer at the United Nations’ World Food Programme. He brings experience working at the intersection of spatial data science and climate adaptation at the University of California Santa Cruz, Sust Global, StreetLight Data, Columbia University, and Apple.
sharing insight into his work at the UN World Food Programme
Systems Thinking for Sustainability with Professor Rachel Beth Egenhoefer
This course develops skills in systems thinking, a powerful tool to understand and manage the underlying patterns, structures, and paradigms that influence environmental outcomes and social change. Students will learn system essentials and leverage points, such as balancing feedback loops for sustainability, changing rules and incentives, making information flows public, supporting self-organization of ecosystems and environmental movements, and transforming goals from profit maximization to supporting life on the planet. Throughout the course, students apply these skills in exercises and a project specific to their interests, whether in a business setting, policy making, program development, ecological restoration, or community work.
Professor Rachel Beth Egenhoefer is a full-time Design professor at USF, where she has taught since 2009. She is a design researcher and consultant whose work focuses on sustainability and systems thinking as related to behavior change. She is the editor of the award-winning Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design (2017, 2019), writes Regenerative Conversations on Substack, and has spoken globally about Sustainable and Regenerative Design.
