New People

Seth Spelman . Seth Spelman is the new Associate Director of S4.  He got his PhD in geography at the University of Buffalo and he was a postdoctoral research associate at UNC. For three years (2001-2004) he was GIS Coordinator for the Digital Design Lab, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. His two most recent publications are on "Social Area Analysis, Data Mining, and GIS" and "Using a Combination of Nodal and Path Demand to Model Spatial Uncertainty in Facility Location Problems."

Rhacel Parrenas . Rhacel Salazar Parrenas is coming to Brown as Professor in Aermican Civilization.  She is a qualitative sociologist with research interests in women's labor and migration, the family, and economic globaization. Space and locality are organizing principles in her work on women's migration, and she sees them as contingent social factors that shape social actions and relationships. As such, she situates the migration of women in the context of spatial inequalities in economic globalization. Her work focuses on the migration of women from the Philippines, examining the lives of women in both sending and receiving communities of migration. She has done ethnographic research in Italy, Japan, the United States, and the Philippines.

Sriniketh Suryasesha Nagavarapu . Sriniketh Nagavarapu is a new Assistant Professor in Economics and Environmental Studies.  His research interests involve the role that labor market choices play in environmental issues, primarily in developing countries. Currently, he is working to understand the consequences of a potential ethanol expansion on regional land use patterns and deforestation in Brazil; these consequences depend intimately on not only the decisions of sugarcane producers, but also the movement of workers across regions and between sectors. In addition to this primary set of interests, Sriniketh also enjoys examining the design and implementation of government transfer programs in developing countries and the US, with examples being food assistance and youth job training.

Leah Van Wey  . Leah Van Wey will join Brown as Associate Professor of Sociology, as a core faculty member of the Environmental Change Initiative, and a faculty associate of the PSTC. Van Wey comes to Brown from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work examines migration, land use, and household livelihoods in developing country settings, most notably Brazil. Her research incorporates multiple methods including quantitative, qualitative, and spatial data. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 2001.