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Academics / M.A. / Ph.D. in Geography / Research Facilities

Research Facilities

The Department of Geography has departmental offices for faculty and graduate students in the Patterson Office Tower. Across the plaza, Miller Hall is home to additional offices, laboratories, and the Department's Gyula Pauer Cartography and Geographic Information Laboratory with up-to-date computing, GIS, and mapping capabilities. The Laboratory's facilities support professional graphics workstations and the latest GIS, statistical, and visualization software.  The W. T. Young Commonwealth Library houses over 2.6 million volumes.  The library's holdings include a special Appalachian Collection, a collection of Kentucky geographer Ellen Churchill Semple's papers, and a separate map library.  It is also a regional depository for U.S. Census, Federal, and United Nations documents.
 
The Department maintains strong linkages with interdisciplinary research centers and programs on campus, including the Appalachian Center, the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, the Kentucky Transportation Center, the Committee on Social Theory, the Kentucky Geological Survey, the Digital Public Humanities research group, The Tracy Farmer Institute for Sustainability & the Environment and the Japan Studies program. These and other programs offer students an opportunity to engage with scholars from a broad range of disciplines such as Anthropology, Forestry, Landscape Architecture and Gender and Women's Studies.  In addition, students may gain valuable international field experience through participation in the summer field courses organized each year in Yatsushiro, Japan, and Oaxaca, Mexico.