For nearly 50 years, the Geography Department at UNM has provided an ideal location for faculty and students to explore human-environment interactions. The Department currently has 6 full-time faculty, 18 affiliated faculty and lecturers, 55 undergraduate majors, and 15 graduate students, and we are implementing a strategic plan that calls for additional growth over the next several years.
In both courses and research projects, we use multiple perspectives and tools to understand the relationships between people and environments, often relying on urban Albuquerque and the wider American Southwest as a living laboratory. From water management to economic development to climate change to cultural hybridization, the Southwest faces numerous complex issues that geographers are well positioned to address. Our newly revitalized degree programs (B.A. Geography, B.S. Geography, M.S. Geography, and Geography Minor) prepare students for professional careers with government agencies, non-profit organizations, private business, or educational and research institutions.
Faculty and graduate student research interests range broadly, including water law and policy; watershed management; energy policy; administration of public lands; common property resources; transboundary resource conflicts; environmental knowledge production; representations of water control projects; error and uncertainty in spatial data; error propagation modelling; terrain analysis and modelling; water resources modeling; community-based mapping using GIS and GPS; land use management; environmental health; economic development; marginalization and marginal regions; remote sensing of ecosystem health; historical geography of the irrigated West; sustainability and environmental policy; transportation geography; urban food accessibility; retail geography; biogeography; human impacts on plant and animal distributions; and land degradation.
In addition to the Department's individual strengths, our faculty and students also enjoy access to the larger scholarly community that is the University of New Mexico. Founded in 1889, UNM occupies 600 acres along old Route 66 in the heart of Albuquerque, a city of more than 700,000 people. As New Mexico's flagship university, UNM is committed to diversity and boasts a number of nationally recognized programs in multiple disciplines. UNM is the only institution in the country that has a Carnegie Very High Research Activity designation and a federal designation as a Hispanic-serving insitution.