| Land
& Water Management in Michigan
Transportation & Urbanization in Asia
South & Southeast Asia
I
have experienced professional “epiphanies” at intervals
in my career. My initial professional interests focused on maritime
shipping as it relates to economic
development in the Third/Fourth
World, as mediated through the variable efficiency of seaport
cargo transfers. Those interests broadened to the
study of domestic land transportation
systems as related to growth and change of
urban systems in South and Southeast Asia. I have
focused on the intra-urban differentiation of India’s largest
metropolises (Delhi, Bombay/Mumbai, Calcutta/Kolkata, and Madras/Chennai),
based on special processing of unpublished Census of India data.
I have made excursions into the historical
geography of trade—most notably the 19th
century ice trade from New England to India, and more recently
the 19th century pepper trade from Asia to the United States (and
redistributed around the globe).
Having begun as a quantitative geographer,
in the early ’80s I developed, together with Profs. Tom
Hodler (Georgia) and George Hepner (Utah), computer graphics and
mapping systems—before interactive mapping software was
routinely available. This lead me to yet another metamorphosis
in the late ‘80s towards GIS as a preferred research tool
(and I introduced GIS into WMU’s curricula).
I co-founded in 1989 Western’s Groundwater
Education in Michigan Regional Center, and used
GIS to analyze ground water contamination of Michigan’s
glacial drift aquifers—and developed protection plans for
local governments based on these analyses. In 1992 I established
the GIS Research Center,
with projects focusing primarily on issues of land and water management
in Michigan. A more recent interest has been a land cover approach
to the historic evolution of urban sprawl in Michigan—featured
in the Michigan Trend Future Study.
I retain unabashed interest in most of
these topics and have manuscripts on several in various stages.
I welcome working with students on these, or related, topics.
My work has been funded by the American
Institute of Indian Studies, the National
Science Foundation, the W.K.
Kellogg Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays
Faculty Research Abroad Program, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, the Michigan
Department of Environmental Quality, the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers, the Kalamazoo
Community Foundation, Western
Michigan University, and the Lucia
Harrison Fund.
Prior to chairing the Department of Geography,
I directed WMU’s undergraduate program at Sunway
College in Malaysia. I take pleasure in affirming
cultural diversity among student and faculty colleagues. |
