Why Geography, Environment & Society?

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Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota is a top-ranked department that provides a setting for academic study or professional training in one of the nation's outstanding public land-grant research universities. Located in the heart of the Twin Cities, one of America's most attractive and vital metropolitan areas, our programs in geography, urban studies, and geographic information science prepare students for careers in academia, industry, government, and nonprofit sectors.

Our faculty have expertise in geo-visualization spatial thinking and complexity; nature, society, health, and environment; environmental dynamics; geographies of globalization and new cultural formations; and global-urban laboratory and metropolitan studies. Within these areas, you'll find a variety of research themes that represent varying degrees of integration between or among these five key sub-disciplines.

We are proud of our world-class facilities, which include up-to-date cartography/GIS and physical geography laboratories; support for tree-ring analysis, soil characterization, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction; and some of the nation’s finest libraries and research centers including the Borchert Map Library and the University of Minnesota Cartography Lab. Our students work with leading hardware and software used in contemporary research, teaching, and commercial applications.

We embrace community and intellectual exchange: weekly research coffee hours, the annual Ralph H. Brown lecture, the John R. Borchert lecture series, and many social and recognition events.