22 Dr. Brad Bays Brad Bays teaches Introduction to Physical Geography and the Geography of Oklahoma. During the 2023-24 academic year, he served as the department's associate head and was elected treasurer of the Oklahoma Alliance for Geographic Education (OKAGE). Trained as a historical geographer, Brad's current research focuses on how regional scale evolution manifests at local scales, particularly in agricultural specialization and residential patterns. He is currently working on a project that connects historical qualitative data, such as farmers' journals, manuscript census schedules, local market records, and landscape evidence, to understand the processes of agricultural mechanization in the Winter Wheat Belt before significant federal influence. Specifically, this research examines the local manifestation of mechanization from the post-settlement period, when animal-powered general farming was prevalent, until the Agricultural Act of 1949, which established permanent legislation for subsidies and price supports. The project aims to uncover how local, shortterm decisions affect agricultural intensification, generally understood at a coarse scale from countylevel census data. More recently, in the spring semester, Brad began a collaborative research project using manuscript census schedules to study historical changes in local-scale residential patterns in the historic African American community of south-central Stillwater. Dr. Hongbo Yu Dr. Hongbo Yu continued to enjoy being a member of the geography family. In the past year, he worked on a few projects in collaboration with colleagues within and outside the department. In the project supported by the Joint Funding Opportunity from the National Animal Health Laboratory Network and the National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program, he and colleagues from the OSU Oklahoma Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory continued to develop a point of care (POC) foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) diagnostic assay and an interactive online mapping system to visualize the geolocation-enabled records collected from the assay. Ehsan Foroutan, a geography PhD student working as a GRA on the project, was helping him to complete the tasks related to the creation and development of a web GIS system that can support the entry and visualization of detected disease cases and provide wise routing decisions of livestock animals during a disease outbreak to reduce disease spread risk. Hongbo also worked with Michael Larson and Dr. Allen Finchum on the Oklahoma Historical Society/State Historical Preservation Office project last year and successfully renewed the project in the new fiscal year. In a Rural Research Initiative project led by Dr. Tao Hu, Hongbo joined the team effort to evaluate the usage of mobile wellness units and investigate the accessibility issues related to rural healthcare services in Oklahoma. In the fall semester of 2023, Hongbo successfully developed and offered an online version of the GIS for Socioeconomic Applications course. This new addition to the online curriculum brings the option of completing the GIS Certificate program fully online one step closer.
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