Dear Colleagues, Staff, Graduate and Undergraduate students,

Happy 4^th of July!!!!

You have probably heard rumors, so with this e-mail I am informing you that at the end of this Fall semester (which is the beginning of our 51^st year as a Dept) for personal health and family reasons I will be leaving UTK.

In seeking a climate more conducive to my health and access to family on the West Coast, I have accepted the position of tenured Associate Professor in the new Graduate Program in Rangeland Ecology & Management, Department of Agriculture, Nutrition, and Veterinary Sciences (ANVS) in the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources (CABNR) at The University of Nevada, Reno. This puts me within 2 hours of Sacramento, CA where my youngest nephew has just received kidney transplants.

This was not an easy decision as I leave excellent colleagues including my hiking/camping buddies D. Foresta & Kurt Butefish and undergraduate and graduate students who have led to my development into a capable instructor and enhanced considerably the research conducted by my laboratory. For the access to undergraduate researchers and the faculty supports in terms of grants and other recent enhancements of this program, I thank Dr. Boake most profoundly for her support.

I thank Drs. Alderman, Tran, Foresta, Grissino-Mayer, Harden and Nagel in Geography and Dr. Taimi Olsen with the Tennessee Teaching & Learning Center, and Provost Zomchick for my improvements as a teacher and the positive development of my academic portfolio. Dr. Zomchick thank you for Faculty Pub and the workshops/trainings and Diversity dialogues.

I thank Dean Lee and Dr. Alderman for their support and advice with this decision. Dean Lee has been a true advocate of our Department and a visionary with Dr. Alderman for its future.

I especially would like to thank my Faculty mentors: Dr. Horn and Li for preparing me both professionally and academically for tenure at UTK. With your tireless support, I have become a responsible citizen of this University and for that I am most grateful.

I will not start in my new position until January 2018, so I am teaching GEOG 494 Undergraduate Research this summer and I will be teaching GEOG 413 Remote Sensing of the Environment and GEOG 435 Biogeography this Fall semester.

Allow me this shameless plug: The Student evaluations of Remote Sensing have been steadily improving and the GTA’s particularly Mr. Kyle Landolt (who literally busted a Gall Bladder for this course) have been highly regarded. I extend a heartfelt “thank you!!” to these 3 GTA: Sara Lewis-Gonzalez, Xiaoyu “Larry” Lu, and of course Kyle. Thank you very much for your selfless efforts on behalf of 413. Also, a thank you to Wanwan Liang from the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology of the UT Ag Institute for conversion of the 413 lab modules to R, thus expanding our student’s skill sets.

Many Students have been successfully employed based on the skills they have acquired in Remote Sensing, so I would encourage you to take this and Biogeography this Fall semester to enhance your portfolios.

Lastly, I’d like to thank Drs. Alderman, Li, and Tran for the hiring of Mr. Mckinney and Mr. Camponovo, In the last year they have really promoted our Geography Dept and the newest research tract of Dr. Li and myself in Augmented Reality, i.e., the Sand box!!

Do let me know how I can be of assistance to you in making a smooth transition, before I leave in January.

My kindest regards,

Robert

From the Rivals & Discovers of the Calculus:

"God has chosen the world that is the most perfect,that is to say, the one that is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena."

— Leibniz

"I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." 

--- Isaac Newton