Curricula Vitae in Geography

Name	Personal Focus	Summary
Jessica Barnes Associate Professor		My research examines the culture and politics of resource use and environmental change in the Middle East. Her first book, Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt, forthcoming with Duke University Press, is an ethnography of water and the politics surrounding its use. In her current project, she is exploring the nexus of climate change, water management, and agricultural policy in the Middle East.
Dr. Gregory J. Carbone Professor	climatology	My major research project examines how the water resource community uses climate information in their decision making.
Susan Cutter Professor	disasters, hazard vulnerability	My primary research interests are in the area of disaster vulnerability/resilience science--what makes people and the places where they live vulnerable to extreme events and how vulnerability and resilience are measured, monitored, and assessed.
Carl Dahlman Professor	effects of armed conflict on human populations	Carl T. Dahlman, Ph.D., is a political geographer whose research primarily focuses on the effects of armed conflict on human populations, especially the dynamics of ethnic cleansing/genocide and forced migration on post-war state-building processes in the former Yugoslavia and Middle East. His fieldwork has been funded by the National Science Foundation and other sources and his publications include a detailed co-authored book on post-war Bosnia in addition to over 40 articles and book chapters.
Meredith Deboom Assistant Professor	analyzes distributive politics of natural resource extraction and development in sub-Saharan Africa	Meredith J. DeBoom joined the Department of Geography in 2018 after earning a Ph.D. in Geography with a Certificate in Development Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She also holds a B.A. in International Studies and Political Science with minors in Economics and Geography from the University of Iowa. Prior to her academic career, DeBoom worked in public policy with the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency.
Dr. Kirstin Dow Professor	Climate change impacts, vulnerability, adaptation, and decision-making	My major research projects address vulnerability and decision-making with respect to climate variability, climate change and water resources.
Dr. Jean Taylor Ellis Professor	coastal science, applied science, sediment transport	Dr. Jean Taylor Ellis is an NCAA Division I NCAA champion and 1996 Olympic Swimming Team alternate (formally ranked in the top 10 in the world). She has spent her career advocating for water and coastal issues. She is now the Interim Dean for Student Success and Engagement for The Graduate School and a coastal scientist in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina. She is one of the only women on the Board of Directors for the Coastal Education and Research Foundation.
Dr. Conor M Harrison Associate Professor	energy and society, economic geography, urbanization and urban change	My research examines how American society has and continues to shape its energy infrastructures, and conversely, how energy infrastructures shape the American consumption of energy. Past research has examined energy and segregation in the American South, while current research examines long distance transmission, home wiring, and smart grid developments.
Professor April Hiscox Associate Professor	Boundary Layer Meteorology, Aerosol Dispersion, Lidar	Dr. Hiscox's primary research interests are in microclimate and boundary layer meteorology. Her research involved field measurements and remote sensing techniques with an emphasis on lidar for atmospheric applications. Current research topics include tree sway interactions with turbulence in and above forest canopies and agricultural air quality studies.
Yuhao Kang Assistant Professor	Geographic Information Science (GIS), Geospatial Data Science, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI)	Dr. Kang directs the GISense Lab at the University of South Carolina. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and obtained his bachelor's degree from the Wuhan University. He had working experience at the Google X and MoBike. Dr. Kang’s research mainly focuses on Human-centered Geospatial Data Science to understand human experience at place and develop ethical and responsible GeoAI approaches.
Dr. David Kneas Associate Professor		David’s research examines the history and contemporary articulations of Andean landscapes, in particular, how past discursive landscapes shape the material geographies of the present, and vice-versa. His current book project is a historical ethnography of an ongoing conflict over a proposed copper mining in northwestern Ecuador.
Robert Allen Kopack Instructor	the closure, remediation, and repurposing efforts of defense sites in Kazakhstan, environmental regulations/public/private sector negotiations related to commercial space facilities	Dr. Kopack received his Ph.D. in human geography from the University of Toronto in 2020. Working across political economy and the environment, his doctoral research focused on Soviet defense industry conversions in Kazakhstan in formerly secret cities and their adjacent military installations and landscapes. For this research Dr. Kopack spent more than two years in Kazakhstan and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
Dr. John A Kupfer Professor	Terrestrial ecosystem ecology, GIScience, National parks	My primary research and teaching interests are in biogeography and landscape ecology. The common thread that runs through much of my work, however, is the influence of human-imposed spatial patterns on ecological dynamics and how these dynamics are then manifested in altered ecosystem patterns and processes
Dr. Jerry T. Mitchell Professor	environmental hazards, geography education, Latin America	Jerry T. Mitchell is Director of the Center for Geographic Education, past Editor of the Journal of Geography, and Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina.
Cary J Mock Professor	Climatic hazards, Arctic and alpine environments, Historical environmental change	My interests in climatology consists of the following three aspects: 1) synoptic/regional climatology, 2) late Quaternary paleoclimatology, and 3) historical climatology.
Dr. Caroline Rose Nagel Professor	Migration and cultural/political change in Europe and the United States, citizenship politics relating to ethnic and religious minorities, Arab and Muslim minority groups	My PhD work on British Arab communities revolved around the concept of 'assimilation'and what it means for immigrants themselves to assimilate into a 'host society'. My aim was to arrive at a critical understanding of assimilation-one that recognizes the everyday, highly spatialized politics through which immigrants negotiate their membership in national societies.
Dr. Cuizhen (Susan) Wang Professor	Remote Sensing, Geospatial Analysis, Geography and environment	Dr. Wang’s primary research interests are bio-environmental remote sensing and geospatial analysis. Particular areas include optical/radar synergy, satellite time-series analysis and a wide spectrum of environmental applications such as bioenergy, tallgrass prairies, oak decline, forest fire, wee invasion, marsh dieback, coastal flood monitoring, and more recently drone technologies for near-surface 3D vegetation mapping.
Sicheng Wang Assistant Professor	investigating social, economic, and environmental issues related to emerging technologies, human attitudes and behavioral shifts in response to on-demand ridesourcing and autonomous vehicles, disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on behavioral patterns	Dr. Sicheng Wang earned a Ph.D. in Planning and Public Policy from Rutgers University in 2021. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University from 2021 to 2023, working on an NSF-funded project — Preparing the Future Workforce for the Era of Automated Vehicles (WEAVE). He also worked at the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center (Rutgers University) and the National Center for Smart Growth (University of Maryland). Sicheng was an urban planner and planning project manager.