Two faculty lines available - information for prospective applicants

The UMBC Department of Geography & Environmental Systems is seeking applicants for two tenure-track faculty positions at the Assistant Professor level. The attached advertisement will be published in Jobs in Geography and in EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, and it will also be distributed to several email lists and to department chairs and program directors. The ads will run in November and December and applications will be considered beginning on December 10, continuing until both positions are filled.

The first position is for a faculty member with technical expertise in Geographic Information Systems and spatial analysis. Area of research specialization is open, but the successful candidate will need to be able to teach both an introductory and an advanced GIS course as part of the regular rotation. The second position is for a faculty member with broad interdisciplinary training in Environmental Science; the range of research interests and teaching responsibilities are specified in the advertising copy. This is the first new line provided by our administration in support of a new environmental science degree program (currently in the proposal stage), with additional lines anticipated over the next two to three years. The teaching load in our department is typically either 4 or 5 classes per year, depending on class size, research activity, and external funding.

UMBC, with a total student population of 10,000, has experienced significant increases in externally funded research over the last 10 years, with an annual amount presently in excess of $50 million. Using the criteria of the Carnegie Classification of Higher Education, based on research funding and doctoral degrees awarded, our campus today would be classified as a Research 2 institution, a category that at present includes only 27 public universities in the U.S. Along with the research emphasis, our campus and our faculty have a strong commitment to excellence in teaching and to involving undergraduates in research wherever possible.

There are several emerging research opportunities that may be of particular interest to prospective candidates.

Our campus hosts the headquarters of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), one of only two NSF-sponsored Urban Long-Term Ecological Research sites in the United States. Our department is working closely with BES researchers and staff on both research and educational issues, and we expect that relationship to strengthen and to provide mutual benefits over the next several years.

We also host the Center for Conservation Research and Technology (CCRT), a research group focusing on development and application of advanced technology for conservation of biodiversity and habitats. Part of their research mission involves biotelemetry and tracking of migratory bird species on a regional and hemispheric scale, but there are numerous other aspects of their research that may foster collaboration in spatial analysis research, environmental monitoring, wildlife ecology, and hazards mitigation.

Another prominent research operation based at UMBC is the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), a consortium with NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center that includes the departments of Geography & Environmental Systems, Physics, and Computer Science/Electrical Engineering. There are currently more than 40 JCET Ph.D.-level researchers working on a broad range of topics including atmospheric dynamics, remote sensing, and interdisciplinary earth science applications.

In addition we are currently awaiting word on EPA funding of a new research center focusing on environmental effects and policy aspects of urban and suburban development. The proposal for this research center originated in our department but the expectation is that the center will have a broad agenda in building on a network of relationships that extends across research institutions, government agencies and citizens' groups throughout the region.