Arizona State University at Tempe’s new School of Geographic Sciences has recruited Billie Lee Turner, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and most recently director of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. He specializes in sustainability science.
Turner will join Arizona’s faculty in July as the school’s first Gilbert F. White chair in environment and society. Arizona State’s School of Geographic Sciences launched in 2006 focuses on interdisciplinary study.
The university has hired four additional faculty members with expertise in urbanism, landscape ecology, spatial analysis, and geocomputation. “It’s very unusual that a university makes a major investment in geographic sciences the way ASU has done,” says Mr. Anselin [Luc Anselin, founding director of the geography school and director of its GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation]. “I’ve never seen a geography department hire five full professors in one year.”
About 20 years ago Mr. Turner sat next to me on a plane to an AAG meeting. Before he told me who he was, he extracted that I was a geographer and proceeded to test me on my ability to explain our discipline. I recall thinking that this was a very mean thing to do. I’ve gotten over it and might perhaps do the same to a newly minted graduate.
