Several visiting scholars and new research assistants have joined CIESIN recently. Here for the fall semester is Lina Eklund, a graduate student from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at the Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences, Lund University, Sweden. Eklund is conducting independent research using remote sensing and other types of data such as surveys and secondary data to investigate urbanization in Kurdistan and its effects on land use, rural development, and urban-rural migration. Visiting CIESIN for a year and a half is Yuanyuan Yang, a doctoral student in land use management from Jilin University in China. Her research focuses on changes in farmland ecosystems in Northern China in response to climate warming over the past century. Yang also has a BS in land resource management from Jilin. Xiaoteng Cen is a doctoral student in land use & land use policy at Zhejiang University, China, who will be at CIESIN for one year. He is researching land use changes driven by land use policy in the Zhejiang coastal region.
Olena Borkovska and John Squires have joined the CIESIN team as research assistants for version 4 of the Gridded Population of the World. Borkovska has a BA in environmental policy and management from the Geography Department of Hunter College, City University of New York. Squires, who is also working on the project Developing Global Building Exposure for Disaster Forecasting, Mitigation, and Response, recently received his BA in sustainable development from Columbia. Jane Mills is working on the Hudson River Flood Hazard Decision Support System project, and creating maps of Haiti's governmental offices as part of CIESIN’s activities in Haiti. Mills has a BA in applied mathematics from Barnard and a minor in environmental science.