天美传媒

Professor Hirokawa joined the faculty at Albany Law School in 2009.  

He teaches courses involving environmental and natural resources law, land use planning, property law, and jurisprudence.  

Professor Hirokawa's scholarship has explored convergences in ecology, ethics, economics, and law, with particular attention given to local environmental law, ecosystem services policy, watershed management, and environmental impact analysis. 

He has authored dozens of professional and scholarly articles in these areas and has co-edited (with Patricia Salkin) Greening Local Government (forthcoming 2012, ABA). Prior to joining the faculty at Albany Law, Professor Hirokawa was an Associate Professor at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law.  

Professor Hirokawa practiced land use and environmental law in Oregon and Washington and was heavily involved with community groups and nonprofit organizations. Professor Hirokawa studied philosophy and law at the University of Connecticut, where he earned his JD and MA degrees.  He earned his LLM in Environmental and Natural Resources Law from Lewis & Clark Law School.

Ryan specializes in environmental governance and environmental, water, property and land use law. She is a prolific legal scholar who presents widely in the United States, Europe and Asia, and she appears regularly in news media. A former U.S. Forest Service ranger, she was a Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Research Project, a Fulbright Scholar in China, and a Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich.

Jaap Vos has a passion for strengthening local rural economies, protecting agriculture and helping rural areas retain their unique identity. His research focuses on finding ways to maintain rural communities’ distinct character while also embracing that Idaho is one of the fastest growing states in the nation.
Vos believes that understanding change is more relevant than understanding growth. Past census data shows Idaho is one of the nation’s fastest-growing states. Looking deeper, Vos says, at who Idahoans are now, what they want and how they live, will provide valuable insight into how areas are changing, what residents need and how to shape communities to reflect local values.
In the classroom, Vos inspires students with courses on community planning, sustainable communities and rural planning issues. He’s also the founding co-chair of APA Idaho's Ag Chat, a group of planners and stakeholders who tackle emerging planning issues in rural communities.
Available to speak on:

Population change in Idaho
Land use change in the American West
Rural planning
Challenges of planning for amenity rich communities (GNAR communities)
Protection of agricultural lands

Chunyuan Diao has been an assistant professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the university of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2017. She teaches courses including Introduction to Remote Sensing, Techniques of Remote Sensing, and Programming for GIS.
Her research focuses on computational remote sensing of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics at local to global spatial scales and daily to decadal temporal scales. She has a particular interest in advancing computational remote sensing paradigms in characterizing land surface patterns and processes, underlying mechanisms, and subsequent feedbacks to the atmosphere. Her work combines remote sensing, process-based models, field observations, artificial intelligence, and high-performance and cloud computing to study ecosystem structures, functions, and responses to climate change and human activities. This research traverses varying ecosystems, including natural (e.g., forest), human-dominated (e.g., agriculture), and disturbed (e.g., species invasion) ecosystems. Current focus areas include computational remote sensing, multi-scale land surface phenology, intelligent agriculture, and invasive species and biodiversity.
Her research team has developed a novel framework, called CropSight, to retrieve the object-based crop type ground truth. CropSight is a unique national-scale crop ground reference data repository and embodies a wealth of season-long remotely sensed crop growth and environmental attributes across crop growing locations for most crop types in the U.S.
She is a fellow of the Association of American Geographers and previously received the Early/Mid-Career Research Award from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (2023), a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2021), the NASA Early Career Investigator Award (2021), and AAG Early Career Scholars in Remote Sensing Award (2020).
Research interests

Time series remote sensing, space-time analytics
Vegetation phenology, continuous vegetation monitoring
Computational remote sensing, deep learning
Agriculture, forest, and invasive species dynamics

Education

PhD, Geography, State University of New York at Buffalo
MA, Biostatistics, State University of New York at Buffalo
BS, Beijing Normal University

Website

Wenwu Tang’s primary interests are centered on computational science and geographic information science and include: spatiotemporal analysis and modeling of complex adaptive spatial systems (CASS); application of artificial intelligence and, in particular, machine learning and software agents in the study of CASS; and the use of cyberinfrastructure technology to support the resolution of computationally intensive geospatial problems. One thread of my research is focused on the modeling of adaptive spatial phenomena (e.g., movement of animals or pedestrians, land use and land cover change, and diffusion of disease and information). Another thread of my research is to investigate the utility of advanced cyberinfrastructure technology (including high-performance computing, massive data analysis and handling, and virtual organization) in the resolution of large- and multi-scale spatial problems.