Department News
Dr. Robert Brinkmann, elected the Vice-Chair of the Board of the National Cave and Karst Institute (NCKRI) and has a very busy year!
I had a very busy year finishing up my duties as a faculty member at the University of South Florida and am pleased to be the new Director of Sustainability Studies at Hofstra University. I am really excited to be a member of the Department of Global Studies and Geography and I am also looking forward to working with the National Center for Suburban Studies.
In addition to moving, I am in the midst of co-editing a special issue on karst and sustainability for the Journal of Cave and Karst Studies. Karst landscapes, or the landscapes of limestone terrains, are rarely examined as a uniform landscape. I have a book chapter coming out on karst and sustainability with my former Ph.D. student, Sandra Garren. In addition, I have an article under review on the development of a karst sustainability index with my colleagues from USF, Phil van Beynen and Kaya Townsend. I also had an article accepted in the journal, Energy Policy. The lead author of that article is my former graduate student, Sandra Garren and Abdul Pinjari is also a co-author. I also wrote an article (again with former graduate student Sandra Garren) on the state of U.S. climate change policy that will be coming out this year in a special issue of Portal: Global Climate Change and Post Copenhagen Discord.
This spring, I was elected the Vice-Chair of the Board of the National Cave and Karst Institute (NCKRI). I had a great trip out to NCKRI Headquarters for the opening of their new building in Carlsbad, New Mexico. NCKRI has an amazing new green building that includes a bat roost.
I also started a new sustainability blog as part of a course project with my students. Check it out! It is www.bobbrinkmann.blogspot.com In the coming months, I will be working with a variety of stakeholders at Hofstra to develop the new sustainability undergraduate and masters program. If anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear them. Please Robert.brinkmann@hofstra.edu.