SPIA | Good News

Good News from the Director:
just click a date:

November 12, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Joel Peters will have book published
2. John Rohr gives last lecture in three-part series on the U.S. Constitution
3. Sara Swenson receives 2009 Outstanding Commitment Award
4. Laura Boutwell works to establish after-school program for refugee girls and young women
5. Heather Switzer completes PhD and has paper accepted for publication
6. CPAP students, faculty and alumni attend 30th annual SECOPA in Louisville, KY
7. Larkin Dudley returns from invited speaking engagement in China
8. Anne Khademian and Laura Jensen return from collaboration discussions with Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea

November 4, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Wilma Dunaway continues Appalachia work
2. Krisha Chachra elected to Blacksburg Town Council
3. Tim Luke has chapter published in Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails
4. Dr. Youngsoo Ryu joins CPAP as visiting scholar

November 3, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Anne Khademian elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration
2. Max Stephenson just published in Public Policy and Administration
3. Diane Zahm and class featured on front page of News Messenger
4. Casey Dawkins, Ted Koebel and Ralph Buehler published
5. Jesse Richardson attends invitation-only meeting at UPenn Law School

October 19, 2009...
Featured are:
1. UAP goes to ACSP
2. Karen Till attends annual meeting of German Studies Association
3. Giselle Datz and Matt Dull organize seminars on Transparency issues
4. Casey Dawkins, Ted Koebel and Ralph Buehler have article accepted and secure grant
5. John Rohr speaks on the U.S. Constitution
6. Visit by Bill Anderson, USAID Senior Official

October 13, 2009...
Featured are:
1. John Randolph presented with "The Virginia Tech Climate Action Commitment Resolution"
2. Heike Mayer holds successful study abroad over summer 2009
3. Yang Zhang invited to prestigious US-China meeting in Beijing

October 9, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Ted Koebel and others receive share in large research grant from NIOSH and CDCP
2. Kris Wernstedt and Pam Murray-Tuite receive NSF grant
3. Matt Dull and Patrick Roberts have op-ed in latest issue of Roll Call

September 28, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Jesse Richardson on Karst Protection
2. Gerry Kearns on BBC Radio
3. Heather Switzer successfully defends doctoral dissertation

September 11, 2009...
Featured are:
1. CPAP's new Local Government Management graduate certificate
2. UAP starts newsletter for undergrads in EPP and PUA
3. Kris Wernstedt and Jim Wolf work on climate change and urban growth in the DC metro area
4. Diane Zahm gives keynote address at the 1st International Seminar on Urban Security in Santiago, Chile
5. Karen Till awarded grant to run symposium on "Spectral Traces"
6. Sang Choi publishes in Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management
7. Rob Lang's press coverage for work on the bright future in Las Vegas
8. Gerry Kearns has been busy
9. Gerard Toal and Gerry Kearns published in Human Geography
10. New colleague, Derek Hyra
11. Elisabeth Chaves, PGG student, wins Christian Bay Award for best paper
12. David Bieri, PGG student, has chapter accepted for publication in forthcoming book
13. Krisha Chachra is rising star in Southwest and Central Virginia

July 29, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Valerie Lemmie - 2nd Inclusive Management Fellow in CPAP
2. Mary Jo Willis - CPAP doctoral candidate gets Presidential Nomination
3. Adrienne Smith says "good bye"
4. Will Butler passes Ph.D. dissertation defense

July 22, 2009...
Featured are:
1. CPAP fully reaccredited
2. Ted Koebel's Urban Development Studio

June 15, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Sonia Hirt in the Balkans
2. Casey Dawkins receives HUD funding
3. John Rohr returns from Leiden University
4. Yang Zhang and students in UAP 5114
5. Gerry Kearns has article and book published

May 10, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Sonia Hirt
2. Ridenour Fellow
3. Roanoke Collaborations
4. Heike Mayer
5. Bruce Goldstein
6. Elizabeth Morton
7. Awards Evening
8. Penelope Louise Evans

April 20, 2009...
Featured are:
1. John Randolph
2. Ralph Buehler
3. Heike Mayer and Paul Knox
4. Karen Till
5. Melony A. Price-Rhodes
6. Public Knowledge

April 3, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Yang Zhang
2. Diane Zahm
3. Anne Khademian
4. Rob Lang
5. Wilma Dunaway
6. UAP Cosmopolitan Series with Joe Riley, Mayor, Charleston, South Carolina
7. High Table at CPAP
8. John Randolph
9. Accreditation Visits
10. SPIA Working Papers

March 12, 2009...
Featured are:
1. John Randolph
2. Heike Mayer
3. Max Stephenson
4. Kris Wernstedt
5. Leah Wickham
6. Adrienne Smith and Cory Walter

February 26, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Ridenour Fellow - Mindy Fullilove, M.D.
2. Gerard Toal
3. Joyce Rothschild and Max Stephenson
4. Bruce Goldstein
5. Rob Lang
6. Diane Zahm
7. Sang Choi
8. Yang Zhang
9. SPIA Authors
10. Web pages

February 12, 2009...
Featured are:
1. Sonia Hirt
2. Heike Mayer and Paul Knox
3. John Browder
4. Kris Wernstedt and Jim Wolf
5. David Bieri

January 26, 2009...
Welcome to the new semester and the new year.
Featured are:
1. Derek Hyra
2. Paul Knox
3. Ralph Buehler
4. Patrick Roberts and Matt Dull
5. Kris Wernstedt and Jim Wolf
6. Joel Peters
7. John Randolph
8. Karen Till
9. Anne Khademian
10. Sang Choi
11. Heike Mayer
12. Rob Lang and Casey Dawkins
13. Bruce Goldstein
14. Ralph Hall
15. Max Stephenson
16. Ioannis Stivachtis
17. Curt Gervich
18. The Annex
19. Other News

November 7, 2008
The election had many at SPIA busy as volunteers for either party or assisting with the polling process. Some of us were engaged as experts. Brian Cook was an advisor to ABC News while Rob Lang and Casey Dawkins helped analyze the vote for the USA Today using typologies that show how ballots were distributed across the nation’s top 50 metropolitan areas. MI is also running a separate data analysis that looks at the vote across Virginia. Two reports will be issued over the next month based on the national and state election analysis. Very well done Brian, Rob, and Casey we are very proud of your visibility at this important moment.

Virginia Tech News covered Gerard Toal's NSF funded research with John O'Loughlin of U of Colorado and Michael Ward at U of Washington on the geopolitics of Kosovo and borderland conflicts in the Russian Federation: http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2008&itemno=643. Great stuff Gerard

Heike Mayer and Ralph Buehler taught a weekend module class on Arlington County as a best practice case in urban revitalization. They used the county’s transit-oriented development strategy to explore the intersection of transportation and economic development. The class was unique as it also included 15 students and faculty from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. The group was visiting the DC region to study suburbanization and they were daring enough to stay in Manassas for a week. They were also filmed by Arlington County’s television station and the footage might appear in a documentary about Arlington County’s approach to smart growth. Arlington County - VT Module. Well done Heike and Ralph

Yang Zhang tells me that he has won a summer fellowship from the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy. This generous award is very competitive [there were forty applicants for Yang’s award] and it will allow Yang to work in China this summer and to employ research assistance for his project on environmental hazards and land use planning. Congratulations Yang.

Some of Karen Till’s students on her class - UAP 2014 - were featured in the Roanoke Tribune of 23 October after they had been working in the Hurt Park neighborhood on a housing survey. Well done Karen and well done to the students.

I have been travelling a little. I gave a keynote address to a conference in Portugal on “Representations of Violence and the Violence of Representation.” I gave a paper on Progressive Geopolitics at a conference on Critical Geopolitics in Durham, England, where Gerard Toal gave a keynote. I also gave a keynote at a conference on ‘Romantic Nations’ in Cardiff, Wales. Oh, and I also went to a Hokies football game and brought them luck against Maryland!

October 21, 2008
Heike Mayer tells me that she has just Joint-edited a special issue of the Economic Development Quarterly on industry clusters and sustainability. The papers were an outcome of the Academic Summit that she helped organize for the cluster conference of The Competitiveness Institute in Oct. 2007. For a list of articles, including an introduction, co-authored with Sheila Martin of Portland State University, see: http://edq.sagepub.com/current.dtl. Well done Heike.

Karen Till has just returned from Calgary as the 2008 Douglas Gillmor Visiting Lecturer. This program was established in honor of the founding director of the Architecture Program at the University of Calgary to bring a scholar or architect to deliver a series of seminars, field excursions and public lectures during the block week for the School of Architecture and Environmental Design. In October, she was also at the University of the Arts in Zurich, Switzerland, where she was invited by German artist Stefanie Bürkle to speak on her work on creative urban projects. Her work on the relations between art and public memory includes a recent essay, “Unresolved Remainders: Memory, photography and place in Judith Tucker’s Tense,” in the exhibition catalogue for UK artist Judith Tucker’s ‘Tense’ shows at the Myles Meehan Gallery, Darlington Arts Centre, and Drumcroon Gallery, Lancashire, U.K. (Wild Pansy Press, 2008). Congratulations Karen.

Rob Lang has been talking to the press about the geography of the election arguing that the housing crisis is producing blowback in the suburbs against McCain
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/10/20/demographer-sees-a-wasilla-problem-for-mccain/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/10/19/ST2008101901797.html
Great stuff Rob, front page news again.

Bruce Goldstein’s efforts in organising the Robert Bullard visit were well rewarded. The session where Max Stephenson and Robert Bullard talked with graduates was well attended and lively. Bullard’s lecture filled the room at Engel and the article on Bullard in the Collegiate Times was all one could want – except that it gave the wrong time for the talk; if you were there at 7pm, sorry. Congratulations Bruce.

October 16, 2008
John Randolph is having a busy week. Along with several of our undergraduates, he was centrally involved with the PowerShift events on campus last weekend. This state-wide network on alternative energy hosted James Hansen among others and a brief report appeared on the frontpage of our own Collegiate Times. http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/2008/10/13/tech_hosts_first_annual_virginia_power_shift. John is now rushing back and forth to Roanoke to be with the Society of Environmental Journalists at their annual meeting, <http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/2008/10/13/tech_hosts_first_annual_virginia_power_shift> http://www.sej.org/confer/index1.htm. Well done John.

Also on the front page of the Collegiate Times this week, one of our new PUA students (Justin Graves) has written an article on mountain-top removal; <http://www.sej.org/confer/index1.htm> http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/2008/10/15/moving_to_save_mountaintops. Congratulations Justin.

Max Stephenson has been invited to serve as President-elect and then President of the Nonprofit Section of National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration; <http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/2008/10/15/moving_to_save_mountaintops> http://www.naspaa.org/ . Tremendous news Max.

Sang Choi has had further publishing success. His paper on "County Limits: Policy Types and Expenditure Priorities," has been accepted to the American Review of Public Administration; while Carol Jacobson and Sang Choi's "Success Factors: Public Works and Public-Private Partnerships," has just appeared in International Journal of Public Sector Management. 21(6):637-657. Well done Sang <http://www.naspaa.org/>.

October 13, 2008
Max Stephenson tells me that the Institute for Policy and Governance has just heard of three successes:
"We learned on Friday that we have won the Child Care State Research Capacity - Cooperative Agreements Grant ($569,248 over three years) and Faces of Virginia Families (capacity building project ) Subgrant of $9,000. We also have negotiated a small governance capacity building grant with Virginia Second Harvest Food Bank of $3500." Congratulations to Max and his co-workers.

Following hard on the heels of Matthew Dull's dissertation prize, I hear from Ralph Buehler that the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning has awarded him the the 2008 Barclay Jones "Best Dissertation in Planning" award for his PhD on 'Transport policies, travel behavior, and sustainability: a comparison of Germany and the U.S.' Well done Ralph.

October 9, 2008
Thanks to Bruce Goldstein’s energy and initiative SPIA will be hosting a visit from Robert Bullard. The visit is extensively co-sponsored and you can read a report on the VTech News website - http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2008&itemno=605. Well done Bruce.

John Randolph is centrally involved with a very ambitious set of events concerning issues of sustainability, alternative energy sources, and energy conservation. I will circulate further details later but one of the central events featured on the Vtech News website - http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/campus_notices/campusnotice.php?item=1990. This Power Shift meeting involves centrally a number of SPIA undergraduates - "The Environmental Coalition of Virginia Tech is hosting a massive state wide sustainability conference, Virginia Power Shift, including keynote speakers, Dr. James Hansen, the worlds leading climate scientist, and Mike Tidwell, the Founder and Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network." Congratulations to our students and to John.

October 7, 2008
News about our achievements

Matthew Dull’s dissertation, "The Politics of Results: Comprehensive Reform and Institutional Choice" (University of Wisconsin-Madison), was awarded the Leonard White award at the APSA meeting in August. The American Political
Science Association's Leonard D. White prize is awarded annually for the best dissertation in the field of public administration. The award is supported by the University of Chicago. This is a wonderful achievement, well done Matthew.

Together with John O’Loughlin (University of Colorado) and Michael Ward (University of Washington), Gerard Toal has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant (from the Human and Social Dynamics Program) to study secessionist regions in Eurasia. The team argued that the granting of independence to a secessionist region of Yugoslavia set a precedent that was likely to ripple across Eurasia and would particularly affect three secessionist regions with aspirations to formal state status: Trans-Dinestria in Moldova and Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway regions within the internationally recognized borders of the state of Georgia. The research proposal proved to be not only timely but critical to the future of US-Russian relations for a war in August over South Ossetia precipitated the defeat of the Georgian state and the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states by the Russian Federation. Of the total grant ($749,970), $112,000 is to support Gerard’s efforts. Well done Gerard, we all know how difficult it is to get NSF grants.

At Blacksburg we held the first of our “Politics on Campus” meetings on October 1st. You can watch some ‘highlights’ at http://www.collegiatetimes.com/stories/2008/10/02/video__forum_on_voter_registration . Thanks to the grads, faculty and students who turned up and gave us a full room. My only gripe is that the student journalists report this as if SPIA and the Department of Political Science were not directly involved. I have emailed the editor about this discourtesy but otherwise I think we should be pleased to have been prominent in organizing an important political event for campus. We had the local registrar, the Democratic Party organizer responsible for voter protection, a State delegate, and a professor from Political Science. I chaired the event as you can see briefly from the video.