The USC Spatial Sciences Institute welcomes three new faculty members this fall.
Dr. Jennifer Bernstein, lecturer, has research interests in American environmentalism, Western American environmental history, online teaching and learning, and California geography. Her most recent publications are Mother Earth and Earth Mothers: Why Environmentalism has a Gender Problem in Breakthrough Journal (June 2017) and Vickers Hot Springs: Ecotopia or Tragedy of the Commons? in Case Studies in the Environment (April 2017). Her Ph.D. is in geography from the University of Hawai’i Manoa; her doctoral dissertation topic was on developing a quantitative metric to assess contemporary environmental worldviews. She also holds a M.S. in science education from Montana State University, an M.A. in geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a B.S. from The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA. Prior to joining SSI, she was on the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara City College, and Hawaii Pacific University, where she developed and taught residential and online geography courses. Previously, she worked at the political strategy firm American Environics, where she served as senior data analyst, and has worked as a field and restoration ecologist.
Dr. Andrew J. Marx, associate professor of the practice of Spatial Sciences, focuses on improving the uses of satellite imagery to inform domestic and international public policy. His research interests include the development of remote-sensing methods and techniques for time-series analysis of urban watershed/forestry management, conflict monitoring and urbanization. His current research includes “LA’s Urban Forest Since 1985, Understanding the Drought through Historical Satellite Data” (U.S. Forest Service), “Improving Estimates of the Martian Cratering Rate” (Microsoft), and “Detecting Human Rights Violations in Syria; a Landsat-Based Approach.” His most recent publication, “UAV data for multi-temporal Landsat analysis of historic reforestation: a case study in Costa Rica,” appeared in the International Journal of Remote Sensing in 2017. He has a Ph.D. in geographical sciences from the University of Maryland, a Master in City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, a M.A. in Humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills, and a B.S. in humanities from the U.S. Air Force Academy. Before joining the USC Spatial Sciences Institute, Marx was an assistant professor of geographic information systems at Claremont Graduate University’s Center for Information Systems and Technology. He previously served as a foreign affairs analyst at the U.S. Department of State, a research fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide, and an officer in the U.S. Air Force.
Dr. Ran Tao, lecturer, has areas of expertise in GIS, spatio-temporal analysis, spatial interactions, spatial statistics, spatial data mining, geovisualization, and transportation. His most recent publication are “Flow HDBSCAN: A Hierarchical and Density-Based Spatial Flow Cluster Analysis Method” in ACM SIGSPATIAL’17, and “A Density-Based Spatial Flow Cluster Detection Method” in Short Paper Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience2016). His Ph.D. in geography and urban regional analysis is from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; his dissertation was on “No Boundary for Spatial Interactions – Exploratory Spatial Flow Data Analysis.” His B.S. in Remote Sensing Science and Technology is from Wuhan University, China. He serves as a reviewer for Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Scientia Iranica, Transactions in GIS, and Computers, Environment and Urban Systems.
We look forward to working with them!
