Student/Faculty Spotlight

Rachel Mauk

Rachel is a second year Master’s student in the Atmospheric Sciences Program working with Jay Hobgood. She specializes in tropical cyclones (TCs), focusing on the North Atlantic basin. Her research interests are TC genesis from both tropical and non-tropical sources, rapid intensification, and numerical modeling. She is also interested in climate literacy and policy. Rachel graduated from Ohio State in June 2008 with B.S. degrees in physics and geography.
Rachel’s thesis examines tropical transition, which occurs when a non-tropical system transforms into a TC. Sometimes called ‘hybrid’ TCs, these storms frequently retain some physical characteristics of their prior non-tropical state after they have been officially classified as tropical by the National Hurricane Center. Hybrid TCs tend to form in the late spring (May and June) and late fall (October through December), though they are possible at nearly any time of year. Hybrid TCs are a significant threat to maritime interests because their unusual structure causes difficulties in accurately forecasting intensity changes. Her project studies the environmental conditions which produced twenty late-fall eastern Atlantic TCs, seventeen of which developed via tropical transition.
Portions of this work were presented at the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Annual Meetings in 2008 and 2009, the 28th AMS Hurricane Conference in 2008, and the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum in 2008. This research was supported by an AMS Graduate Fellowship through NOAA’s Climate Program Office and by a Distinguished University Fellowship through the OSU Graduate School.

Nurcan Atalan-Helicke

Nurcan Atalan-Helicke is a Ph.D. Candidate with research interests in political ecology, international political economy, agriculture, conservation and development. Her dissertation is titled “European Union Accession and Wheat Diversity in Neoliberal Turkey” and her advisor is Dr. Becky Mansfield. In her dissertation, Nurcan examines how the seed has become the object of intervention for both state policies and international organizations, including the European Union and World Trade Organization, and the farmers’ responses to ongoing socio-political and economic changes in terms of conservation of traditional wheat varieties. Nurcan is from Turkey, and has completed seven-months of fieldwork in rural areas of Turkey, four months in 2007 and three months in 2009, funded by Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant from the NSF. She expects to graduate in June 2010.
Nurcan follows multi-scalar research and complements the analysis of secondary data with findings from ethnographic research. Nurcan presented some of her preliminary findings at the annual meetings of Association of American Geographers, and will present more at the Middle East Studies Association meeting in November 2009. A manuscript about the current legislative changes in Turkey about plant genetic resources is also planned for publication.
Nurcan has been a volunteer for Global Bus Program for OSU outreach activities, and gave several presentations about Turkey, Turkey and the European Union, US Foreign Policy in the Middle East to Ohio communities, both at school age and above. She also follows participatory approaches in her research and had a meeting with 17 stakeholders in July 2009, in one of her research locations, where an action plan for the conservation and marketing of the traditional wheat variety was prepared.

Michael Ewers

PhD Candidate Michael Ewers returned to campus this quarter after spending a year in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Grant.  Michael’s research focuses on the human capital dimensions of international economic development.  He studies how places attract and utilize global human capital and foreign knowledge through migration, trade, and investment as means to generate local development capacity.  His advisor is Dr. Edward J. Malecki.

Michael’s regional specialization is the Middle East, an interest which stems from his four years as an Arabic linguist in the U.S. Marine Corps.  This is reflected in his dissertation, which examines how the UAE and the other Arab Gulf States have used their oil wealth to “import” the labor and human capital necessary to diversify their economies beyond oil. In the Gulf, oil abundance has reduced incentives to create local development capacity, instead promoting a dependence on foreign labor and knowledge.  Michael’s project consists of a four-decade analysis of Gulf industry and labor data, a large-scale survey of foreign and local corporations in the region, and key-informant interviews with companies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Michael was awarded a 2009/10 Presidential Fellowship from OSU Graduate School and will spend the coming year writing his dissertation.  Michael’s wife, Cheryl, and daughter, Eleanor, accompanied him to the region where he was affiliated with UAE University Geography Department.  He is pictured above with his daughter on the outskirts of the Rub’ al Khali or “Empty Quarter” – one of the largest expanses of desert in the world.