ACT welcomes the following new students and visiting scholars for the coming 2007-08 academic year:
Director Emilio Moran (center) with Gilvan, Sandra, Angela, and Kennedy
Gilvan Guedes is a visiting research associate from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Gilvan will be working with Paula Sauer Dias and Dr. Emilio Moran on a project involving the use of formal demography to create fertility estimates for Altamira using data from 2005. He will also be working with Bernardo Lanza Queiroz from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and ACT’s Leah VanWey on a project on economic and sociological motivations for intergenerational private transfers in Altamira in 1997-98 and 2005. Gilvan will be with ACT for the entirety of the 2007-2008 academic year.
Visiting professor Dr. Sandra da Costa comes to ACT from the Universidade do Vale do Paraiba where she teaches urban geography. At ACT Sandra will be studying the urban growth of the municipality of Ponte de Pedras over the span of thirty years. She will be working here with Dr. Eduardo Brondizio for the next year. ACT also welcomes her husband Andre Becker and her daughter Barbara da Costa Becker.
Angela Siqueira is a new SPEA Environmental Science Ph.D. student from São Sebastião in northern São Paulo. Angela earned a master’s degree from INPE (Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research), with a focus on remote sensing. She then worked with the Brazilian federal institution of SIPAM (Amazon Protection System) for several years. She will be working as a graduate research assistant with Dr. Tom Evans, Dr. Emilio Moran, and Scott Hetrick on the NSF-funded research on regeneration of forests in the state of São Paulo and Indiana.
Francisco Kennedy de Souza is a Fulbright Fellow from the Federal University of Acre who will pursue a Ph.D. at SPEA in Environmental Science. His doctoral research will examine the impact of environmental governance policies on the economic-ecological system of the Amazonian region. He will also be focusing on forest fragmentation analysis using GIS and remote sensing techniques through satellite images. Kennedy will be working with Dr. Eduardo Brondizo.