Dear USF MSEM Community,
Welcome to the 2024-2025 academic year! It has already been an exciting week of students and faculty returning to campus after the summer break. During our orientation event last Saturday, we were thrilled to welcome our new cohort of students, coming to MSEM from a variety of disciplines, environmental backgrounds and work experiences. We are excited to see them grow within the program and make connections with our faculty, professionals in the field, and with our continuing students. We hope that you will all mingle and network in your courses and in the series of events that we have planned for this semester, as well as learn from each other’s experiences and knowledge.
Curriculum Highlights
We have exciting news on our curriculum: Our updated GIS curriculum and certificate requirements are officially in place. Our GIS certification now includes a new scripting course requirement that will provide students with differentiating skills as the job market evolves. Prof. Paul Nesbit will be teaching our Python for GIS course, a newly designed course that will teach students how to understand and develop effective GIS workflows to conduct advanced analyses with large geospatial datasets. We are also introducing a new course on GIS for water management with Prof. Chris Lowrie, where students will learn about flood and drought risk management using geospatial technologies, and draw from Prof. Lowrie’s extensive experience and research with the World Food Program. Also new this year is our course on Systems Thinking for Sustainability with Prof. Egenhoefer, where students will learn how to integrate sustainability principles within policy making.
We are also offering again our longstanding courses on Environmental Health, with Prof. Allison Luengen, Wildfire Ecology with Prof. Tracy Benning and our series of courses in Energy Systems and Resources with Prof. Gordon Johnson. We are excited for our students to both broaden their knowledge and skills, as well as dive deeper into their field of interest.
Research News
Exciting news on the research side of things: our MSEM faculty have been hard at work engaging in cutting-edge research, and securing opportunities for student research assistantships and internships. Prof. Allison Luengen, just returning from a semester-long sabbatical in Australia, is working on understanding the factors that affect accumulation of metals in organisms ranging from marine mollusks to coyotes in urban coastal areas. Prof. David Saah, and GsAL manager Fernanda Lopez have established several projects with agencies and collaborators, from internships with CALFIRE on geospatial analysis of vegetation and fuel, to research with the Environmental Law Institute to map climate risks to the US court system, to work with the California Agricultural Land Observatory on sustainable agriculture.
Prof. Amalia Kokkinaki, also just returning from sabbatical, is working on an ongoing project on the transport behavior of PFAS in agricultural systems, and continues her work with collaborators from Cal State East Bay and SLAC on predicting methane emissions from soil systems within river floodplains. Prof. McDonald, starting his sabbatical this semester, is embarking on research related to hydrological budgets, and Prof. Siehr is going to be working on a book on Environmental Policy during her own sabbatical. All projects present opportunities for MSEM students to learn skills invaluable for their future paths as environmental managers where they will be interfacing with scientists, engineers and policy makers.
Upcoming Events
We encourage our students and our community to engage in our courses, in research, and in all the events that we have planned out for the semester. Join us in our professional development and career exploration workshops, our panel on water and ecological resources management and our seminar on environmental policy and justice. The first events are just around the corner: August 26 come to our writing workshop with adjunct faculty Prof. Johnson, and definitely do not miss our upcoming GeoEducation Summit VII focused on GeoAI and happening on September 13, hosted by our very own GsAL, the Computer Science department and BayGeo. Come meet leaders in the industry of geospatial analysis and learn about the exciting potential of GeoAI in solving some of the biggest environmental challenges.
With that, have a lovely and productive semester, and see you soon!
The MSEM team – Amalia, Tiffany & Maggie
