Kelleann Foster, MLA
Kelleann Foster is author of Becoming a Landscape Architect: A Guide to Careers in Design. Her research and design work is characterized by outreach that is interdisciplinary, inclusory, and directed at the lay-public audience. That work strives to address issues of community design/planning and community character preservation through thoughtful design, appropriate regulations, and the deployment of new media technology.
Kelleann serves as the lead faculty for a new series of graduate-level programs in geodesign. During a recent sabbatical, she was based in California and working with Esri on a virtual studio environment. Kelleann can be reached at [email protected].
David E. Goldberg, MLA
David Goldberg is advancing the knowledge of landscape architecture education and practice by developing the role of landscape architects in interdisciplinary design. From an award-winning collaborative interdisciplinary design studio, David researches building and geographic information modeling, as it relates to site design in the integrated project delivery process. Additionally, he is contributing to the curriculum development of a new online geodesign program for the department. Through this initiative and his work with the interdisciplinary studio, he is also developing techniques for remote collaboration and online studio critiques, using virtual world simulators and dynamic displays. David can be reached at [email protected]
Larry J. Gorenflo, PhD
Dr. Gorenflo's research emphasizes two areas: past landscapes, primarily in central Mexico; and landscape design for biodiversity conservation. His work in past landscapes focuses on changing regional settlement as a means of adaptation, and human impacts on the natural environment in the Basin of Mexico between 3000 BC and the present. That work addresses substantive issues in the fields of archaeology and history, using geographic information system (GIS) technology and related analytical methods.
His work in conserving biological diversity focuses on designing landscapes to allow people and other species to co-exist, with an emphasis on protected areas (such as national parks) as well as corridors between parks. The conservation work also uses GIS technology and focuses on global issues as well as projects (based on fieldwork) ongoing in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, and Southeast Asia. In both cases, Dr. Gorenflo continues to explore new and improved applications of GIS to issues related to landscape and landscape design; he also employs perspectives from anthropology and geography, the two disciplines in which he is trained, to understand various aspects of landscape design. Larry can be reached at [email protected]
Ron Henderson, MLA, MArch
Prior to Ron Henderson's appointment at Penn State in 2011, he worked as the first full-time, non-Chinese architecture faculty member in China, introducing the discipline as an inaugural faculty member at the Tsinghua University landscape architecture program. He has worked to established many academic ties between Asian and American professionals and students, which includes a long-term research focus on routine maintenance in both China and Japan, for which he received a 2012 Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship, sponsored by the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and administered by the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the first landscape architect to receive this fellowship since its inception in 1978. He has introduced Chinese contemporary landscape projects and designers internationally as well, and he continues his professional leadership as the head of the Penn State Department of Landscape Architecture. Ron can be reached at [email protected].
Beth Fletcher King, MEd
Beth Fletcher King is co-author and instructor of GEOG 483: Problem Solving with GIS, and instructor of GEOG 482: The Nature of Geographic Information. She is the assistant program manager for Online Geospatial Education, following the progress of students in the Master of Geographic Information Systems program and communicating with them to address questions and concerns and to ensure that their questions are addressed by the appropriate faculty member, staff member, or administrator. She previously worked as a GIS analyst for a private water/wastewater engineering firm, where she managed a wide range of GIS projects, from turnkey sanitary sewer conversion to 911 rural addressing. She can be reached by email at [email protected].
Stephen Mainzer, MSLA
Stephen Mainzer has several years of professional practice experience in landscape architecture and geospatial design, having worked for several well-regarded design and planning firms. While completing his master's degree in landscape architecture at Penn State, he was named the University Olmsted Scholar. He is interested in how we make informed decisions leading to resilient and sustainable systems. His transdisciplinary experience at the intersection of spatial analysis, landscape architecture, and design visualization enables him to explore methods for managing places where natural resource processes conflict with human behaviors. He specializes in using geospatial methodologies for understanding and visualizing landscape change. Stephen can be reached at [email protected]
Timothy M. Murtha Jr., PhD
Dr. Murtha is broadly trained as an anthropologist and landscape archaeologist with specific experience in geomatics and GIS. He has three active and funded field research programs in Mexico, Guatemala, and Scotland. His primary research and teaching interests are in settlement patterns, settlement ecology, historic preservation, and landscape anthropology/ethnography. He focuses on several core areas of teaching, including advancing the use of complex, dynamic, and interactive GIS analysis within the discipline; advancing the use of computer modeling to evaluate design effects; developing a theory of settlement pattern and settlement change; developing an ethnographic method for studying, analyzing, and interpreting landscapes; and applying the analytical methods and tools of anthropology within landscape design and planning. Dr. Murtha can be reached at [email protected]
James O'Brien, PhD
James O'Brien is an instructor for GEOG 485: GIS Programming and Automation and a spatial risk scientist at Risk Frontiers, a natural hazards research center located at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Prior to joining Risk Frontiers, James was a principal lecturer in GIS at Kingston University London, where he taught programming, spatial databases, online/web GIS, cartography, and natural hazards.
James' research interests are concerned with the integration of physical and social science factors in modeling risk and vulnerability; modeling evacuation times and routes in vulnerable areas; hydrological modeling; building indices of vulnerability based on the intersection of physical and social vulnerability; and developing web mapping platforms. James completed his BSc in GIS at Curtin University in Australia, a PhD in geography from Penn State, and has nearly 20 years of programming and database experience, and almost 10 years of teaching experience. James can be reached by email at [email protected].
Brian Orland, MLA
Brian Orland returned to the classroom and a more focused engagement in research following a decade as department head and school director. His research interest has returned to perception of the landscape, how that is driven by the physical composition of the land and how, in turn, those perceptions lead to judgments of scenic quality, satisfaction, adaptation — or the opposite of those. He has established research relationships with faculty in the Colleges of Health and Human Development; Engineering; and Agriculture and is pursuing funded research in several areas, including the health and well-being implications of Marcellus shale development in Pennsylvania and the health implications of high-performance building systems as part of a $129 million U.S. Department of Energy project at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He helped lead an NSF–funded initiative focusing on informal science education for adults; an EPA–funded Center for Green Infrastructure and Stormwater Management; and a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation project, Greening the Lower Susquehanna. Brian can be reached at [email protected]
Jim Sloan, MS
Jim Sloan is lead instructor and co-author of GEOG 484: GIS Database Development, as well as teaching offerings of GEOG 482: The Nature of Geographic Information. He has taught GIS and cartography courses since 1995, at both Penn State and the University of Florida. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
Michelle Zeiders, MS
Michelle Zeiders teaches GEOG 483: Problem Solving with GIS, and GEOG 484: GIS Database Development. She has taught introductory and software-intensive GIS courses since 1998. Prior to joining the Penn State GIS faculty, she worked as a GIS programmer/instructor for the Penn State Population Research Institute; GIS project manager/instructor for the Institute for Transportation Research and Education at North Carolina State University; GIS project manager at a private civil engineering firm; and GIS analyst at MapQuest. She received a bachelor's degree in public administration and a master's degree in geoenvironmental studies from Shippensburg University. Zeiders can be reached by email at [email protected].