College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences wordmark. Where the land meets the sky. Home to three academic units. Nine career tracks. Rated the number one school of aviation in the country by Flying Magazine. New professional pilot helicopter track options. Number one regionally in sustainability education. The largest meteorology program in the country. Number one nationally in severe storm research. Geography and environmental sustainability, aviation, and meteorology. There’s only one College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences. The University of Oklahoma wordmark.
Our mission is to conduct innovative and socially relevant research; to expand students’ intellectual vistas via critical perspectives and valuable tools and skills; and to catalyze sustainable human-natural systems.
We seek to shape a sustainable future for Oklahoma and beyond by creating a community of interdisciplinary scholars and leaders who aim to comprehend the Earth’s human-natural systems.
#1
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Sustainability
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3
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research
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Environmental Sustainability addresses how societies can meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The degree offers three different areas of concentration: culture and society, planning and management, and science and natural resources.
Geography is an integrative field that studies people and the world in which they live and the discipline consists of two primary fields: human geography and physical geography. Both of these disciplines use GIS technologies and other analytical tools such as statistics, modeling and qualitative approaches.
Geographic Information Science is one of the most rapidly expanding areas of study and employment in the U.S. addresses how geographic information systems and remote sensing (aerial photography and satellite imagery) are used for gathering, analyzing and visualizing all forms of geographically referenced information.
Launch your career by studying Geography at The University of Oklahoma!
In this month's Speakeasy, we will be talking about what Belonging, Community and Culture mean for the students, staff, and faculty that comprise DGES, and we would also like to open the floor to everyone to discuss and propose what B3C and the DGES as a whole can do to further improve our community.
The deployment of renewable energy systems across vast landscapes across the world - aimed to advance the transition from reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy - brings with it questions of competing land uses, effects on soil and water systems, and implications for equity, justice, and Indigenous self-determination. Indigenous lands house considerable potential for renewable energy generation and are increasingly targeted in initiatives to transition countries away from fossil fuels. Yet top-down planning practices risk both violating sovereignty and reproducing energy systems that mirror the monocropping, single land use mindset of large agribusiness. Our research contributes to the nascent body of research on the integration of solar energy into agricultural and other environmental systems by focusing on the co-design of integrated agroecological renewable systems to emphasize the multifaceted goals that may be achieved beyond or in synergy with crop and energy production that reflect additional goals of Indigenous communities. This project forges a convergent research paradigm that not only deeply integrates disciplinary modes of thinking from otherwise siloed fields, but also incorporates the knowledge and priorities of Indigenous communities, thus demonstrating how underrepresented communities can innovate scientific research that addresses society’s most urgent problems.
Congratulations to Alison Holderbaum and Helen Wagner, two DGES undergraduate students, on being awarded the Provost's 2025 Summer Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (UReCA) fellowship! The Summer Fellowship is intended to provide support to enable students to perform undergraduate research and creative activity over a ten-week period during the summer. The award also recognizes advisors to the students; Dr. Randy Peppler and Angela Person are advisors to Helen Wagner and Dr. Scott Greene is the advisor to Alsion Holderman.
DGES was fortunate to host Rebecca Lave, the Associate Dean for the Social & Historical Sciences at Indiana University and Past-President of the American Association of Geographers. Her research takes a Critical Physical Geography approach, combining political economy, STS, and fluvial geomorphology to analyze stream restoration, the politics of environmental expertise, and non-structural approaches to flooding. Her most recent book, The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research was released late February.
Congratulations to Liam Thompson being named a 2025 Barry Goldwater Scholar!
Congratulations to Noah Stilwell for winning 1st place in the SWAAG Undergraduate Student Paper Competition AND Best Paper by an undergraduate student from the Applied Geography Group!
Liam Thompson, a junior and a double major in the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability (DGES) and School of Meteorology (SOM), recently published a research article titled Assessment of convection-permitting hydroclimate modeling in urban areas across the contiguous United States as the first author in the Journal Urban Climate. This paper is an outcome of his undergraduate research project funded by the DGES in summer 2024, during which he evaluated the performance of CONUS404, a long-term, 4-km continental-scale hydroclimate simulation in U.S. cities. Liam conducted this research while working as a DGES-funded Undergraduate Research Assistant under the guidance of Dr. Chenghao Wang.
Congratulations to Bria Dillard and Abby Williams, two DGES undergraduate students who successfully applied for the Engineering Just Futures Fellowship! The EJF program is a year-long professional learning experience for students interested in Transdisciplinary and Convergent Systems Thinking.
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