Dr. Andrey Petrov (PI)
Professor of Geography, ARCTICenter Director and Academic Director of GeoTREE Center at the University of Northern Iowa. Dr. Petrov is an economic and social geographer who specializes in Arctic economy, regional development and post-Soviet society, with an emphasis on the social geography of Indigenous populations. His current research concerns sustainable development, spatial organization, and restructuring of peripheral economies, as well as dynamics of social-ecological systems. Dr. Petrov leads the Research Coordination Networks in Arctic Sustainability (Arctic-FROST) and Arctic Coastal Resilience (Arctic-COAST). He has published on issues pertaining to socio-economic crisis, development, and demographic dynamics of Arctic populations. Dr. Petrov leads the COVITA project.
Sweta Tiwari (Postdoctoral Scholar)
Sweta Tiwari, Postdoctoral Scholar (Ph.D., Mississippi State University). Before joining the UNI, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Saint Louis University Geospatial Institute (GeoSLU). Her current research focuses on the demography of inequality with the emphasis on spatial patterns by race/ethnicity or country of origin and its relevance for employment, housing, and so on. She received her Ph.D. degree in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from Mississippi State University. Her Ph.D. research traced socioeconomic and spatial processes related to food insecurity, environmental migration, and neighborhood segregation. She pursued her master’s degree in agriculture economics from the same university. Her master’s thesis concentrated on crop revenue insurance.
Dr. Tatiana Degai (Co-PI)
Tatiana Degai is an Itelmen scholar from the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific coast of Russia. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in the American Indian Studies program minoring in Linguistics. Tatiana’s Ph.D. research was focused on language revitalization possibilities in the Russian context focusing on her native Itelmen language. She received her MA at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks at the Department of Anthropology with the research on the concept of sacred places in Kamchatka. Currently, Tatiana is a Post-doc at the ARCTICenter, Department of Geography, University of Northern Iowa. Tatiana’s research interests are concentrating on Indigenous knowledge systems, Indigenous visions on sustainability and well-being. These include Indigenous knowledge and biocultural diversity, cultural landscapes and technology, language revitalization and technology, and Indigenous education.
Mr. John DeGroote (Co-PI)
John has served as the GeoTREE Center Director since December of 2012 after previously serving as a (Senior) Research Associate from 2006-2012. He oversees all training, research, education, and extension efforts of the Center. He has more than 15 years of professional experience applying geospatial technologies to a wide variety of issues. He has worked with professionals across many disciplines and has developed and presented numerous geospatial technology workshops. John also teaches intermediate and advanced Geographic Information Science courses in the Geography Department. John is focusing on geospatial analysis of COVID-19 pandemic and impacts of anti-pandemic measures.
Dr. Alexander Savelyev (collaborator)
Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography at the Texas State University, working on topics of geographic data visualization, text visualization, cartography, typography, GIS, and the likes. He received Ph.D. in Geography from Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Mark Welford (Co-PI)
Mark Welford is a nature-society geographer and spatial epidemiologist at the University of Northern Iowa. His research interests include: environmental change in, and conservation of, tropical montane environments; hurricanes and climate change; and the spatial dynamics of historical pandemics. Dr. Welford is currently an editorial board member for GeoJournal. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society since 1986. His most recent book is Welford, MR, 2018. Geographies of Plague Pandemics: The Spatial-Temporal Behavior of Plague to the Modern Day. Routledge, U.K. Dr. Welford leads the analysis of the COVID-19 dynamics, public health and epidemiological aspects of research and historical comparisons.
Mr. Nikolay Golosov (Research Associate)
Research Associate at the ARCTICenter, Nikolay specializes in GIS, spatial analysis, and cartography. He previously worked on the TAMARA project mapping wild reindeer migration in Taimyr, Russia. He graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a master's degree in Geography and continues to collaborate on the COVITA project.
Dr. Michele Devlin
Dr. Michele Devlin is a Professor of Environmental Security at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and a Professor of Arctic Health and Human Security with the National Science Foundation’s UNI ARCTICenter. She is a Doctor of Public Health, registered nurse, and emergency medical technician. Dr. Devlin’s primary specialty areas include the circumpolar human terrain of the High North, environmental migrants, civil-military response to climate disasters, indigenous populations, and cross-cultural engagement with diverse and underserved populations. Prior to joining the US Army War College, Dr. Devlin was a Professor of Global Health at the University of Northern Iowa.
Ms. Nino Mateshvili (Research Associate)
Nino Mateshvili is a Fulbright Foreign Student Program(2020) fellow scholar from Georgia (the country) undertaking MA study in Geography at the University of Northern Iowa Graduate school. She has gained her BA in Human Geography and another MA in Demography at the Tbilisi State University, Georgia. Currently she is interested in studying Geographic Information Systems at UNI to implement GIS as a data analyst tool in socio-economic and demographic research. She has approximately 8-years of variety of work experiences in Georgia, such as statistics, data quality management, socio-economic research in the communities affected by the big energy infrastructure(HPP) projects, property inventorization and acquisition in the project area, teaching, etc.
Mr. Jonathan Voss (Research Associate)
Jonathan Voss is a Senior Application Developer at the University of Northern Iowa GeoInformatics Training, Research, Education, and Extension (GeoTREE) Center. He is experienced in building client- and server-side applications including web mapping and Geographic Information Systems applications that are efficient, dependable, and maintainable. He is responsible for web applications that have delivered hundreds of terabytes of data to people all over the world. He is proficient in Python, Javascript, C++, SQL and has strong Linux skills. Some recent projects include the Iowa LIDAR Mapping Project and the Iowa Solar Asset Mapping Project