Announcing Staff Changes in HEGS
Scott Freundschuh continues as HEGS Program Director.
BIO: Scott M. Freundschuh holds a Ph.D. in geography from SUNY Buffalo. Scott is a cognitive geographer, specializing in spatial cognition as it relates to types of spatial knowledge and their structures, geographic scale, spatial concept development and understanding, and spatial skills development. He is a faculty member at the University of New Mexico.
Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen joins HEGS as new Program Director.
BIO: Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Georgia. Her research interests include the geography of innovation, geographic implications of industrial evolution with a focus on bio-pharmaceuticals, agri-bio, and bioenergy sectors, energy transitions, foreign direct investment in the United States, and socioeconomic implications of urban-regional population shrinkage. She is a faculty member at the State University of New York-Buffalo.
Kendra McLauchlan is now a permanent Program Director in the Division of Environmental Biology and works closely with HEGS.
BIO: Kendra K. McLauchlan holds a Ph.D. in ecology from University of Minnesota. Kendra is a physical geographer, specializing in reconstructing North American paleoenvironments as recorded in lacustrine sediments and dendrochronological records. She holds an adjunct appointment as a faculty member in Geography and Geospatial Sciences at Kansas State University.
HEGS Program Director Jacqueline (Jackie) Vadjunec has returned to Oklahoma State University where she has been promoted to full professor. Congratulations Jackie!
From GSS to HEGS – Why the Change?
The change from Geography and Spatial Sciences to Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences at NSF is the result of efforts within the Social and Behavioral Sciences Directorate to reposition programs so that they align with the mission of the Directorate. Geography is a broad discipline, spanning multiple paradigms and topics ranging from purely process-oriented biophysical geography to post-modern, humanistic geography. However, not all geographic scholarship is a good fit at the National Science Foundation (NSF). The name change articulates more clearly the human, environmental, and geographical sciences that are appropriate for funding at NSF. This change reflects NSF’s mission to “promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to secure the national defense” and also HEGS’s location in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE).
In general, research that is predominantly post-modern, post-structural, humanistic etc., is not a good fit for NSF. As noted in the solicitation, “A proposal to the HEGS Program must explain how the research will contribute to geographic and spatial scientific theory and/or methods development, and how the results are generalizable beyond the case study.” If research is more biophysical or process oriented, but aspatial and/or not well-connected to social or human dimensions, the proposal could be more appropriate for other programs at NSF. For example, bio-physical science is supported by the programs in the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) directorate, and physical science is supported by the Geomorphology and Land-use Dynamics (GLD) program. When considering the fit of research at NSF, it is useful to understand the overall institutional architecture of the Foundation.
Potential investigators are encouraged to contact a HEGS program officer with questions regarding the fit of their research in HEGS. Please send an email inquiry to hegs-info [at] nsf [dot] gov with no more than a two page attachment that outlines the research question(s) or hypotheses, the intellectual merit and anticipated broader impacts of the project, as well as the methods and anticipated data and analysis.
You can find the new HEGS solicitation here.
You can find the HEGS FAQ here.
Other Funding Opportunities at NSF
Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems (DISES) Program
Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) Program
Coastlines and People (CoPe) Program
Contact information for HEGS Program Directors is hegs-info [at] nsf [dot] gov.
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