GEOG Associate Professor Meredith Gore and Assistant Professor Yiqun Xie have won Faculty-Student Research Awards (FSRA) from the Graduate School for the 2023-2024 academic year. The award provides $10,000 to support faculty-led projects directly involving graduate students. 

Gore will use the funding to send two of her graduate students, Judith Rakowski and Jingjing (Elle) Xu, to conduct fieldwork in Vietnam to study the human dimensions of global environmental change. In collaboration with local Vietnamese and international nongovernmental organizations and Vietnamese park authorities, Rakowski and Xu will apply methods from criminology, conservation, and GIS to understand and identify the geospatial context and conditions around illegal wildlife trafficking in one of Vietnam’s most biodiverse protected areas. 

Xie, along with Department of Finance Professor Vojislav (Max) Maksimovic and Associate Professor Liu Yang, will use the award to fund a graduate student to contribute to their project, “The Spatial Pattern of Success: What Makes Small Businesses Grow Better in Certain Areas?” Using novel spatial data mining and machine learning techniques, the student will investigate why small businesses exploit business opportunities better in some locations than others.