Department News

Ian was awarded a US State Department Critical Language Scholarship Alumni Development Grant. He will use this to support ongoing Indonesian language studies.

When Funmi Oyatogun came to CU-Boulder from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, she vowed to take advantage of as many opportunities for study, research, social action and fun as she could squeeze into a 24-hour day. After all, she reasoned, you go to college for the first time only once. A senior...

Results of a new study show that episodes of reduced precipitation in the Southern Rocky Mountains, especially during the 2001-2002 drought, greatly accelerated a rise in numbers of mountain pine beetles. The overabundance is a threat to regional forests. The research is the first to chart the evolution of the...

A 50-year study, 1960-2010 by Xingjian Liu and F. Benjamin Zhan published in The Professional Geographer , ranks CU Geography 3rd in the placement of doctoral graduates in faculty positions at PhD-granting geography programs. UC-Berkeley and Ohio State rank 1 and 2, respectively. During the recent 20-year period ending 2010,...

While a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder shows the risk of human conflict in East Africa increases somewhat with hotter temperatures and drops a bit with higher precipitation, it concludes that socioeconomic, political and geographic factors play a much more substantial role than climate change. Read...

Whizzing along the I-70 corridor into the Rocky Mountains, it's hard not to notice widespread patches of dry, dead, red trees dispersed throughout the steep green hillsides. Whether they are ponderosa pines or lodgepole pines, many of these trees have been killed by insect infestation, most notoriously by pine beetles...

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $12 million grant to a CU-Boulder-led team to explore ways to maximize the benefits of natural gas development while minimizing negative impacts on ecosystems and communities.

Michael Brown (Geog, '90) will be honored with the CU-Boulder Alumni Associations prestigious George Norlin Award, which recognizes outstanding alumni who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence in their chosen field of endeavor and a devotion to the betterment of society and their community. Brown is a world class mountaineer...

Excited as she was about being at CU-Boulder, Melanie Ferraro’s freshman year got off to a rocky start. Ferraro was eventually able to find her footing, however, in a class she was required to take as a Norlin Scholarship recipient, called Constructions of Knowledge. It wasn’t the class itself that...

Where does our water come from and how does climate change affect its future availability? In the arid West, mountain snowpack holds the answers to these and other questions. Mark Williams, professor of geography and fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), is an expert in snow...