Dawn Parker, Information for Prospective Graduate Students

As of July 1, 2009, I will be relocating to the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.  Prospective advisees are encouraged to apply to graduate programs in the School of Planning and the Department of Geography and Environmental Management.  Graduate students who I have advised (as major advisor and committee member) at George Mason University have been active participants in many of my research projects.  My CV notes graduate student co-authors on publicaitons.  I welcome expressions of interest from highly qualified graduate students interested in modeling land-use change.  

I am able to accept few new advisees each year, and I do not make any final decisions about new advisees until all graduate applications are received.  

I currently have funding available for one graduate research assistant, beginning in fall, 2009, to participate in the SLUCEII project, a collaborative research project with a team from the Univeristy of Michigan.  Further information follows:

A graduate assistantship (minimum of three years of funding) is available for a highly qualified student interesting in developing agent-based models of ex-urban residential land markets.  The research assistant will be part of SLUCE II project (Spatial Land Use Change and Ecological Effects), funded through the US National Science Foundation’s Coupled Natural and Human Systems program.  This is a collaborative, multi-institution, interdisciplinary research project involving six faculty members in the area of coupled human-natural systems.  The project links agent-based modeling of human behaviors driving land use / land cover change (LULCC), preferences for vegetation cover and vegetation management, land market modeling, field work, remote sensing, and ecosystem modeling of landscape carbon balance in low-density human-dominated landscapes (suburban and exurban residential landscapes).  The project uses 13 townships in southeastern Michigan as a model system and seeks to explore thresholds in land use / land cover change and landscape carbon balance that could potentially be altered with policy levers.  

The ideal applicant will have or be able to develop skills in agent-based computational modeling, spatial econometrics, the economics of land markets, and geographic information science.  The student will work under the supervision of Dr. Dawn Parker, with the expectation that the student will complete a thesis based on participation in the research.  PhD level applicants are preferred, but highly qualified applications at the master’s level will also be considered.  Interested students should first contact Dr. Parker via e-mail with a short description of background and interest in the position, a CV, and an electronic copy of an unofficial transcript from the last relevant academic degree.  The applicant would also need to apply and be admitted to a relevant graduate program either in the School of Planning or the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo.  Full applications must be received by Jan. 31, 2009.  Contact information for both programs is provided below.  Additional information on Dr. Parker’s current research, an electronic link to this ad, and links to related publications, are available on Dr. Parker’s home page (http://mason.gmu.edu/~dparker3/). 

http://www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/planning/index.html
http://info.wlu.ca/~wwwgeog/wlgpig/wlgpigmain.htm
http://www.fes.uwaterloo.ca/geography/index.html

Additional information about the new project and other members of the project team is available at http://www.cscs.umich.edu/research/projects/sluce/.  The student will interact closely with collaborators from the University of Michigan, including interactions with two new PhD student positions there, one working with Prof. Dan Brown and the other with Assoc. Prof. Bill Currie.  These students will work in the broad areas of geographic information science, land use / land cover change, coupled human-natural systems, modeling, and landscape carbon balance.  The student working closely with Dr. Brown will focus more directly on understanding and modeling patterns and drivers of LULCC, especially with agent-based modeling, while the student working closely with Dr. Currie will focus more directly on measuring and modeling vegetation management and landscape carbon balance.



Filatova, T., D. Parker, and A. van der Veen. In Press. Agent-Based Urban Land Markets: Agent’s Pricing Behavior, Land Prices and Urban Land Use Change. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.

Parker, D., and T. Filatova. 2008. A theoretical design for a bilateral agent-based land market with heterogeneous economic agents. Computers, Environment, and Urban Systems 32 (6): 454–463. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2008.09.012.

Filatova, T., A. van der Veen, and D. Parker. 2008. Introducing Preference Heterogeneity into a Monocentric Urban Model: an Agent-Based Land Market Model. Pre-proceedings of the Second World Congress on Social Simulation, July 14-18, Fairfax, VA.  Final conference version.

Polhill, J. G., D. C. Parker, and N. Gotts. 2008. "Effects of land markets on competition between innovators and imitators in land use: results from FEARLUS-ELMM" Pages 81-97 in C. Hernandez, K. Troitzsch and B. Edmonds, eds, Social Simulation Technologies: Advances and New Discoveries, Information Science Reference, Hershey, PA. Final submitted  Manuscipt.

Parker, D. 2008. Linking land-use change, land manager behaviour, and ecological change through agent-based land market models. Pages 15-16. Newsletter of the Global Land Project International Project Office.  http://www.globallandproject.org/Newsletters/GLP2008_04.pdf.

Parker, D. C. (2008) “Can Agent-Based Models of Land Use Bridge the Gap between Process and Pattern Based Models?” Presented at the Global Land Project workshop, “The design of integrative models of natural and social systems in land-use change”, Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland on March 1, 2008 (http://glp.macaulay.ac.uk/documents/Parker.pdf; http://glp.macaulay.ac.uk/videos/parker.php;