2025 Awards, Honors and Achievements

On June 11, 2025, the Department of Geography celebrated over 190 B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. recipients at our annual Convocation Ceremony! Professor Michael Brown, Incoming Undergraduate Program Director, and Professor Bo Zhao, Graduate Program Director, announced the following honorees who received awards from the department:

Graduate Awards & Recognitions

Undergraduate Awards & Recognitions

Each year, graduating seniors have the opportunity to nominate an instructor for the Award for Faculty Excellence in Teaching. The recipient of this year’s award is Professor Gunwha Oh. Geography majors shared their appreciation for Professor Oh with their nominations:

• Dr. Oh created an inviting and happy place to learn GIS. She was committed to student learning and formed connections with students.
• Professor Oh was welcoming, encouraging, kind, and funny!
• Professor Oh made all the geography classes I took with her feel engaging and accepting.
• Professor Gunwha Oh has always been very patient in our learning. She would always walk through our assignments so that we understood what was happening while also explaining geographic and cartographic principles.
• Professor Oh gives me a lot of support on academics. She is a very great professor who is patient and kind. She wrote recommendations letters for me so that I finally got admitted to my graduate school.
• Professor Gunwha Oh provided me the opportunity to land my first real technical experience providing me to intern for HDSSI Summer 24. I was able to apply my skills as well as well as learn more during the experience.
• Professor Gunwha Oh not only taught me many of the fundamentals in both GIS concepts and programming languages, but she also encouraged us to be creative in the work we produced. She fostered an environment where critical thinking and innovation were just as important as technical skills, which helped me grow both as a student and as an aspiring data professional.
• Professor Oh provided us with hands-on projects that helped us further our understanding on a variety of subjects including GIS, programming languages, and more.
• I admire her intellect, her compassion, and her support for students. She solidified my decision to choose geography as my major my freshman year. A decision I will never regret.
• I'm quite shy, but Professor Oh was always warm-hearted and comfortable to be around.
• Professor Oh always made the lecture environment welcoming and easy to learn in, and I found all the material she taught very engaging.
• Professor Oh made the classrooms exciting, warm, and full of laughter.
• Professor Oh is one of the most friendly and welcoming professors I have had the privilege of taking classes from. She is so genuine and cares about her students, and is the professor that you take the most classes from within geography data science.
• Professor Oh is really approachable, especially in a small group context. And I could feel she is dedicated to make the lecture as interesting as possible, and she always encourage a collaborative work in the class. I made some good friends there :)
• Professor Gunwha Oh is very knowledgeable and her way of teaching has helped me understand the materials I need to learn to be successful. Professor Gunwha Oh teaching made me want to learn more and pursue a Masters degree in the future.
• Dr. Oh teaches complicated subjects in snippets that students can understand and apply to their work. She is very willing to directly help students whether it is to find motivation or to talk to other students. She is also very understanding of students' needs and emotions.
• She was very engaging with the class and made many attempts to enforce us with the latest trends in GIS and helped us overall build a strong foundation when encountering data. Her contributions and care were invaluable and I felt more proud being a geography data science major through my time in her classes.
• I had Prof Gunwha Oh for a lot of my classes, and each class with her always had a friendly environment where I felt encouraged to participate and engaged with the class, especially the occasional fun class activities she assigned us. She explained concepts clearly, which made the assignments and exams felt easier to do. Overall I had a very enjoyable time in all of her classes and would recommend students new to the major to try taking classes with her.
• Gunwha Oh was a very accommodating and genuine professor. In her class, I felt very natural and really enjoyed being able to be apart of her courses throughout my years. She was fun, and I hope that she is able to continue teaching for many years!

The 27th Annual Geography Undergraduate Research Symposium remains live on the Department of Geography website and features the award winners noted above as well as many other impressive projects in the online Symposium Gallery.