Geography. It’s the assignment of time and place to an infinite number of things. For many geographers, the field is the vehicle that drives research passions, from public health to environmental protection to financial instruments that have a massive grip on real lives.
Name your passion, and geography offers a better way to understand it and to effect change.
A trio of geographers in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences—Louisa Holmes, Emily Rosenman, and Kim Van Meter—are doing just that.
Kimberly Van Meter
Van Meter’s work explores how human interactions have a cumulative effect on water quality, particularly wetlands. Her research is most notable in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed restoration effort.
It’s a process that plays out on longer timescales. Things we do today, positive or negative, don’t often have immediate results. That means two things, Van Meter said: “Our restoration efforts will take time, and we don’t have a lot of time to waste.”
“Things we see entering coastal wetlands today aren’t necessarily related to what we did today or this year; it may be a function of what we’ve done for the past five, ten, or fifty years,” said Van Meter, who is an assistant professor of geography. “Understanding those legacy effects is important. One of the downsides is realizing that there aren’t a lot of quick fixes.”
Van Meter said wetlands are important for myriad reasons. They are a necessary habitat for diverse plants and wildlife, they help with flooding, they filter our drinking water, and they sequester and store carbon, lessening the effects of climate change.
The relevance of her work is shown in the diversity of her research funding sources, which include NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Using an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Penn State and beyond, Van Meter wants to get a better idea of these earth systems and which levers pull what. By better understanding these forces, she hopes to spotlight how changes produce both tradeoffs and synergies. That could also show the value of conservation, cleanup efforts, and more sustainable farming methods.
Understanding what’s happening is the first step to finding solutions.
“That’s something that the government agencies are really keen to want to understand so they know how best to incentivize restoration and conservation programs,” Van Meter said. “It allows them to create a blueprint for restoration that gives us the best bang for our buck.”
Louisa Holmes
Holmes, an assistant professor of geography and demography, is a health geographer and demographer with a background in public health and public policy. Her passion is using geography to shine a light on pressing public health issues such as the opioid crisis. Holmes looks at opioid deaths and how public policy—things like access to Narcan and treatment centers—can lead to fewer lives lost.
As part of the National Opioid Settlement, Pennsylvania will receive more than $1 billion, which includes funding for research. Holmes is part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers looking at ways to effectively distribute those funds.
Pennsylvania communities are working to address substance related issues across the Commonwealth. Holmes is part of the Elevate Pennsylvania Initiative, which is designed to maximize the impact of these efforts by sharing knowledge and resources, conducting research and evaluations, and coordinating projects to improve community health and safety outcomes. The number of drug related overdose deaths in Pennsylvania has increased 236 percent since 2012, with about 84 percent of the state’s 5,044 deaths in 2022 being attributed to opioids, according to Open Data Pennsylvania.
One of the goals of the research is to shed light on corporate strategies to develop counterstrategies for opioid intervention. Holmes and her colleagues are also looking at the Johns Hopkins-UCSF Opioid Industry Documents Archive, a trove of insider documents gleaned from court filings to piece together how the industry targeted new areas for opioid consumer growth. It’s a strategy borrowed from Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, produced amid the massive Master Tobacco Agreement settlement decades ago.
In one of many strategies found in the documents, drugmaker Purdue Pharma sought to target women who just received Cesarean sections for prescription pain medications. These areas for expansion, according to the documents, were called “innovative contracts.” Others targeted women in general, who Holmes said have been statistically less likely to succumb to opioid overdose, or certain ethnic groups.
“We’re interested in interrogating these documents from both a public health and financial standpoint,” Holmes said. “We want to evaluate some of the strategies that pharmaceutical companies used to target certain populations and certain geographies to lay out a roadmap for some of the settlement activity while shedding some daylight on some of the practices of corporations responsible for the opioid crisis.”
Emily Rosenman
Rosenman, assistant professor of geography, got her start in the financial world right around the time of the 2008 financial collapse. After earning her bachelor’s degree in 2006, she worked for a time for a company tasked with helping to fund the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
The urban and economic geographer turned what she had learned on the job to research in graduate school at the University of British Columbia, studying how financial instruments could create such stark winners and losers in the rebuilding process.
“As I was researching the reconstruction efforts post-Hurricane Katrina, so many geographic questions began to emerge: Why do some neighborhoods get rebuilt with huge public support and funds whereas other neighborhoods get nothing?” Rosenman said. “These really are very fundamental questions about inequality and the way that society works, and they were questions I was never able to ask outside of the field of geography.”
In her research, Rosenman wants to know how financial decisions can have winners and losers and desirable and undesirable outcomes, particularly for marginalized groups. For example, if policy is made to promote home mortgages—assets being a critical component to upward mobility—does it lead to more homes being sold to disadvantaged groups, or does it simply increase the gap between the haves and have nots?
Rosenman’s research also adds accountability to policies and financial backers. If companies are lending in the name of helping to promote upward mobility, her research can add accountability to those claims.
Not having a traditional financial background, Rosenman said, is a feature, not a bug.
“A lot of people who work in the realm of financial geography do not come from an economics background. And I think that’s our secret power,” Rosenman said. “We look at these systems and we can immediately see what doesn’t make sense. This viewpoint can lead to some very interesting and basic questions such as: What was served by these different systems? Who’s taking risks? Who’s ultimately benefiting from these decisions and policies?”
That superpower, Rosenman said, is why geographers are capable of adding insight to just about any area of study. It’s a different way of thinking, a different way of illuminating and resolving a problem.
“Geography has totally reprogrammed my brain,” Rosenman said. “That’s why I think this field is so magical, and why I also really like teaching it. You can expose people to new ways of thinking and analyzing the world.”