911³Ô¹Ï

This year our department will undergo an external review and so the timing is right to reflect on what our grads and our program have achieved in the past seven years. Since 2013, our graduate program has remained relatively stable in size at an average of 51 students per year, where 54% of those were PhD students. Our current cohort of 59 students, has almost 40% of students originating from countries around the world; from USA (7), China (3), UK (2), France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Iran, Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Colombia. In the past seven years we have graduated 87 students with 55 Masters and 32 PhDs. Particularly impressive is the number of publications, awards and activities that our grad students have accomplished. We do not have an exact database but thus far our graduate students have been co-authors on at least 240 peer-reviewed journal publications. They were active presenters and award winners at local, national and international conferences ranging from the CAG, AAG and AGU meetings to many other important and related sub-disciplinary symposia, conferences and workshops. The number of awards is also noteworthy, ranging from local 911³Ô¹Ï awards to the prestigious Tri-Council ones such as SSHRC CGSD (5) and CGSM (10), NSERC CGSD (4) and CGSM (3), and CIHR CGSD (2) and CGSM (2). Several grad students have obtained other external awards including conference travel grants and best conference paper or presentation awards. Just to name a few, these include: 2013 and 2016 CAG Starkey-Robinson Award in recognition of high-quality graduate research that furthers understanding of the geography-archive of Canada, NSF 2015 GeoComputation conference travel award, 2016 Garfield Weston Award, 2018 ISPRS Foundation (TIF) Travel Grant, Best Paper ACM SIGSpatial 2018 Conference, 2019-20 AAG William L. Garrison Award for best dissertation in computational geography-archive. Many of our past graduate students transition into remarkable careers for which thirteen past PhDs are tenure-track or teaching faculty at universities in Canada and around the world. These achievements collectively speak to the success of our graduate program, an excellent mentorship model focused on academic research and publishing, and of course exceptional grad students.

Suzana Dragićević
Chair, Graduate Studies Committee