Dr. Melinda Laituri is a professor of geography in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability at Colorado State University. She was the Director of the Geospatial Centroid at CSU that provides support for geospatial research and teaching across the university. She is a visiting scientist at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. Laituri was a Jefferson Science Fellow where she was the principal investigator on the Secondary Cities Initiative, part of the State Department’s Office of the Geographer’s Humanitarian Information Unit mapping rapidly growing under-examined cities. She was the principal investigator on the Department of State’s Cities COVID Mapping and Mitigation program. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona in Geography and held a three-year tenure track position at University of Auckland, New Zealand before joining Colorado State University. Dr. Robert B. Richardson is an ecological economist at Michigan StateUniversity with interests in the study of the environment and development, particularly the contribution of ecosystem services to socioeconomic well-being. His research, teaching, and outreach program focuses primarily on sustainable development, and he uses a variety of methods from the behavioral and social sciences to study decision-making about the use of natural resources and the values of ecosystem services. He has conducted research related to agricultural-environmental linkages, household food and energy security, and tradeoffs in decision-making about environmental management in southern and eastern Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia, as well as in the USA. His work has been published in Ecological Economics, Environment and Development Economics, and World Development.Junghwan Kim is an assistant professor at the Department of Geography at Virginia Tech. Before joining Virginia Tech, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021. His research interests include human mobility, environmental health, GIScience methods, geoprivacy, and geospatial data ethics. His works have been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Journal of Transport Geography, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Environmental Research, and Transactions in GIS. He has received many prestigious awards, including the Peter Gould Award from the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group, the John Odland Award from the AAG Spatial Analysis and Modeling Specialty Group, and the American Planning Association (APA) Transportation Planning Division Student Paper Award.
