From Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2008

PEER REVIEW

Ex-President of William and Mary Heads Back to N.C.; Georgia Tech Chief to Take Over Smithsonian Institution; Arizona State Staffs Up New School of Geographic Sciences

By EUGENE MCCORMACK, ANDREW MYTELKA, and PAULA WASLEY

.....

GEOGRAPHIC SHIFT: Arizona State University at Tempe has a plan to put its new School of Geographic Sciences on the map through a flurry of strategic hires. Its latest recruit is Billie Lee Turner, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an expert in sustainability science, whom Arizona hired away from his position as director of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University.

Mr. Turner, 62, studies how deforestation, desertification, and changes in land use affect people and the environment. He will join Arizona's faculty in July as the school's first Gilbert F. White chair in environment and society. Mr. Turner was won over, he says, by Arizona State's emphasis on interdisciplinary research and the chance to help create a premier center for geographic sciences. "It's an exceptional opportunity," says Mr. Turner, who leaves Clark after 28 years. "It would take something as exciting as what's happening at ASU to get me to leave where I am."

Arizona State's School of Geographic Sciences was created in July 2006 by a reorganization of the university's geography department into an interdisciplinary unit focusing on climate and environmental science, cultural geography, urban and regional geography, and geographic-information science. It houses the Office of the Arizona State Climatologist and a center devoted to mapping geographic data to solve environmental and policy problems. Mr. Turner's hiring will "move the school up a notch" and strengthen its links to Arizona State's also-new School of Sustainability, says Luc Anselin, founding director of the geography school and director of its GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation.

The university has hired four additional faculty members with expertise in urbanism, landscape ecology, spatial analysis, and geocomputation. "It's very unusual that a university makes a major investment in geographic sciences the way ASU has done," says Mr. Anselin. "I've never seen a geography department hire five full professors in one year."