Our Mission

The Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach supports geographic research aimed at informing public policy. We do this in two ways:

  • By providing geographic data paired with quality analysis of that data (labor markets, school attendance zones, legislative and Congressional redistricting, longitudinal census data, metropolitan and rural definitions)
  • By analyzing the relationship among geography, socio-economic patterns, and public policy (segregation and scale, redistricting, neighborhood change, school attendance zone boundary changes)

From this site you will find links to web sites focused on specific projects including work on labor markets and school attendance zone boundaries. The site also house research papers, replication scripts, and other outreach materials.

News and Announcements

Summer 2022

Spring 2022

  • Chris Fowler and Ruth Buck both have chapters in the recent book Political Geometry: Rethinking Redistricting in the US with Math, Law, and Everything in Between. 
  • The Gould Center was well represented at the Population Association of America’s 2022 Annual Meeting in Atlanta this April. Graduate students Ruth Buck and Bill Southern presented their poster “Troubling the Tract: Measuring neighborhood effects on airborne lead exposure using school attendance zone boundaries” based on work with Chris Fowler and the LSABS team. Chris Fowler was also represented on a poster presented by Gould Center alum James Gaboardi “Optimized Spatial Census Information Linked Across Time (OSCILAT): Improving the spatial accuracy of 1990, 2000, and 2010 census microdata.” Ruth and Bill received support to travel to Atlanta through the Ruby S. Miller Endowment for Geographic Excellence.
  • Congratulations to Ruth Buck for receiving an honorable mention for the 2022 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program!
  • Congratulations to Bill Southern for passing his qualifying exam in February!
  • Graduate students Ruth Buck and Bill Southern both presented work from their master’s projects at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers. Ruth’s presentation, “Segregation, Scale, and Student Assignment Policies in Boston,” comes from ongoing research at Penn State examining the how the scale of student assignment policies impacts the interrelationship between school and residential sorting processes. Bill’s presentation, “City planning and GIS: A data-driven approach to inclusion on the Liverpool city ‘Merseyrail’ rail network,” comes out of his masters’s thesis completed in 2021 at the University of Liverpool and explores the role of policy making in shaping inequalities in transportation access.

Fall 2021

  • Chris Fowler was part of a panel sponsored by the American Association of Geographers on September 13th titled “Pennsylvania Redistricting with Geographers with Geographers: Communities of Interest Criteria and Beyond.” A recording of the panel is available here.
  • Chris Fowler was named to Governor Tom Wolf’s Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council. The council will assist and advise Governor Wolf in his review of the congressional redistricting plan to be passed by the General Assembly this year.

Summer 2021

  • James Gaboardi has completed his post-doc at Penn State and has accepted a position with Oak Ridge National Laboratory as an Associate R&D Scientist. Congratulations, James!
  • Chris Fowler testified before the PA House State Government Committee about the tensions inherent in the redistricting process and the need for transparency about how tradeoffs between different priorities get made. Read his testimony here.
  • Chris Fowler published an op-ed in The Washington Post with Linda Fowler titled “Here’s a different way to fix gerrymandering” about the potential that a multimember districted electoral system using ranked choice voting has to bring about fairer voting and representation.

Spring 2021