Dr. Guangqing Chi highlighted with other new faculty members at IU Bloomington
Dr. Guangqing Chi has begun his new position as Provost professor at Indiana University Bloomington where he is already being highlighted by IU Bloomington Today along with 3 other new faculty members.
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The start of the fall semester at Indiana University Bloomington welcomes the arrival of more than 300 new faculty members.
This year’s 307 new colleagues include 37.79% tenured and tenure-track faculty and 32.9% researchers. Together, they represent 37 countries, and 48% are women.
“We are proud to welcome this distinguished cohort of new faculty to IU Bloomington,” said Carrie Docherty, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. “Their innovative scholarship, teaching and service will help shape the future of our campus and strengthen our shared commitment to academic excellence.”
IU Bloomington Today caught up with four new faculty members to learn more about their backgrounds, their research, and their thoughts about the Bloomington campus and community.
Guangqing Chi- Provost professor in the Department of Geography in the College of Arts and Sciences
Guangqing Chi received his doctorate in environmental demography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Mississippi State University, where he became a tenured associate professor. Following a brief role as state demographer at South Dakota State University, he joined Pennsylvania State University as a tenured professor and director of the Computational and Spatial Analysis Core of the Social Science Research Institute and Population Research Institute.
Chi’s research focuses on helping vulnerable populations adapt to environmental change by examining the interactions between communities and their built and natural environments. His work centers on climate change and community resilience, climate-resilient infrastructure and population dynamics, and computational social science. Chi is the founding director and principal investigator of the Environmental Demography Network.
Q: What appealed to you about coming to Indiana University?
A: The primary appeal was IU’s Faculty 100 initiative in the area of environment and health and well-being, which aligns well with my research program. This strategic investment in a key area of global importance, coupled with the opportunity to collaborate with leading scholars across disciplines, presents an exciting opportunity to work together toward sustainability and resilience.
In addition, I was drawn to the warm-hearted and welcoming Hoosier hospitality. The vibrant, friendly and diverse Bloomington community is appealing.
Q: How would you describe your research? How did you get interested in this area? Why is it important?
A: My research focuses on socio-environmental systems, exploring the complex interactions between people and their environments using spatial and big data methods to understand issues such as environmental migration and food security. My interest is deeply personal, stemming from my childhood in a poor, rural fishing village where I saw firsthand how intertwined human life is with the natural world.
This work is crucial because it aims to empower vulnerable communities by identifying the assets they need to adapt to environmental changes, ultimately producing actionable, solution-oriented science. As an example, I lead the transdisciplinary National Science Foundation-funded POLARIS project to investigate how environmental changes impact social well-being, the subsistence way of life, food security, migration and community infrastructure in Arctic Alaska rural communities by working with local stakeholders, community members and 20-plus researchers. By integrating social science with engineering and natural science research, this project creates significant impacts of enhancing community resilience via social capital, institutional resources and critical infrastructure.
Q: What goals do you have for your teaching and research?
A: I will continue to inspire students with a passion for learning and critical thinking, focusing on transdisciplinary approaches to real-world problems. The challenges confronting our world today — environmental, social, health and policy — are complex. No single discipline can solve these challenges in isolation. An interdisciplinary approach, combined with knowledge co-production and collaboration with stakeholders, is essential. However, the scientific method itself, due to its complexity, can be daunting.
How can we effectively master this challenging approach? I will integrate my extensive firsthand transdisciplinary research experience (both as a project lead and as a collaborator) into my teaching. For example, I will teach G603 (Topical Seminar in Socio-Environmental Systems) in the spring, which will help students understand the key concepts and methods of the interactions between the human population and the broader environment, and encourage them to think holistically and critically about population and environmental issues using a systems perspective and a transdisciplinary approach. Equally important, in this class we will address the practical pitfalls and strategies for successful transdisciplinary work.
Read the full article here through IU Bloomington Today.