Suraiya Parvin and Naser Lessani, two doctoral candidates in Penn State’s Department of Geography, will deliver research talks as part of the department’s Graduate Student “Coffee Hour” series at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 7.

Geography majors Jesse Ehrlich and Cadence O’Brien spent a month in Malawi as part of the ECODRYFOREST project, a U.S. National Science Foundation–funded effort to study the ecological and social outcomes of landscape restoration in Southern Africa.

The J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School encourages all graduate students, including those from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, to submit videos to the first round of the 2025-26 Three Minute Thesis competition until Dec. 5.

Naomi Bird, a third-year undergraduate student at Penn State with a dual major in geography and comparative literature, is completing research related to e-cigarette marketing to teens through Penn State’s Scales of Corporate Harm Lab, housed in the Department of Geography.

Thelma Abu, assistant professor of environment and human interactions at the University of Connecticut, will deliver a talk titled “Invisible Wounds of a Warming World" at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 31, in 112 Walker Building and will also be accessible via Zoom. Abu will examine how climate extremes, particularly rising temperatures in semi-arid regions of Africa, affect mental health outcomes in low-resource settings. 

Erica Smithwick, the director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State, will join three other climate scholars at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 29, for a virtual panel event on climate research communication.

For two Penn State geography graduate students, fieldwork in Southern Africa offered more than a research assignment. It provided a front-row view of how science, community and collaboration come together in the effort to restore landscapes undergoing rapid environmental change. Faisal Elias and Abdul-Salam Jahanfo Abdulai spent more than a month in Malawi this summer as part of the Socio-Ecological Outcomes and Monitoring of Restoration in Mosaic Dry Forest-Grassland Ecosystems project, a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded collaborative and interdisciplinary project led by Penn State Assistant Professor of Geography Ida Djenontin. 

Harrison Cole, an alumnus and former postdoctoral scholar in the Penn State Department of Geography, designs maps for the National Geographic Museum of Exploration, currently under construction in Washington, D.C. Cole said the work he did as a postdoctoral scholar in the Walker Building translated directly into the skills he now uses at National Geographic.

The Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences Symposium highlighted University students and faculty across various disciplines, including some from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, applying artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational, data and quantum sciences methodologies to their research. Wan Ki “Arthur” Lo, geosciences doctoral student, won third place in the poster session at the symposium for his research, “Analysis of Ground Deformation Preceding the December 2020 – May 2021 Eruption at Kilauea Volcano, Hawai’i."

Mook Bangalore, assistant professor of environmental policy in the Penn State School of Public Policy, will deliver a talk titled “Understanding the Impacts of Floods on People in Low- and Middle-Income Countries” at noon on Friday, Oct. 24, in 401 Steidle Building at Penn State University Park and will also be accessible via Zoom.