Research

The faculty and students in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Geographical Sciences work on a wide range of cutting edge multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research. Below are some of the main themed content areas and faculty who research in those areas. For student research topics, visit the faculty homepages.

*Faculty Research Concentrations – click for more information
Supercell_r.jpgATMOSPHERIC AND CLIMATE SCIENCE
Meteorology, severe local storms, mesoscale processes, urban meteorology, tropical cyclones, climate and climate change, air quality, water cycle, weather forecasting
COMMUNITY ENGAGED RESEARCH
CHARP (The Charlotte Action Research Project), Human-Environment interactions, urban social geography, community engaged scholarship, global health, neighborhood change, latinx communities
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Groundwater, hydrology, policy, water quality, oceanography, sustainability, land use, climate, energy, resources, ecology, conservation, biochemistry, urban stream ecology, river restoration, freshwater ecosystems, landscape ecology
GEOLOGY
Geomorphology, paleoclimate, structural geology, applied geophysics, tectonics, Appalachian geology, soils, paleoenvironments, rock & mineral resources, karst, weathering processes, quaternary geology, coastal geology, micropaleontology, mineralogy, hydrothermal geochemistry, ore genesis, planetary habitability
GIS AND TECHNOLOGIES
Spatial data: collection, curation, analysis, representation GIS, remote sensing, spatial ecology, cartography, field techniques, CyberGIS, spatial modeling, land use and land cover change
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
Human-Environment interactions, sustainability, urbanization, transportation, economic geography, disease & the environment, hazards and disasters, global cultures, migration, globalization, epidemiology, food justice, immigration, housing, quantitative and qualitative spatial analysis, spatial business intelligence, commercial real estate development
URBAN GEOGRAPHY
Transportation, urban ecology, green infrastructure, urban planning, socio-ecological systems, community resilience, infrastructure, urban design, multimodal transportation planning, community planning
WATER
Surface water hydrology, groundwater hydrology, fluvial geomorphology, river restoration, molecular methods in freshwater ecosystems, hydrothermal geochemistry, hydrogeochemistry, water cycles, water & climate change, drought and aridity
SCIENCE PEDAGOGY
Geoscience education, geographic education