Justine Blanford became the UT's first full professor with an emphasis on teaching
'I've always liked to not only learn things but pass them on to others'
Justine Blanford (1970) uses GIS, big datasets, and a variety of methods to address applied research questions across a range of topics including sinkholes, sky islands, tornadoes, malaria and migration. Since 1 April 2020, Justine has worked in the ITC department of Earth Observation Science as the University of Twente's very first full professor with a focus on teaching.
'At Penn State, I have found that there is a lot to be learned from working professionals'
'I've been very fortunate to have grown up and lived all over the world. As a result, geography was always a part of my life. We used to live in Surinam and my parents are very outdoorsy. We used to go into the jungle so I got to experience a lot of those kind of environments first hand. In Kenya I went to an all girls school where the headmaster believed that whatever boys could do, girls could do just as well – if not even better. We traipsed all over Kenya and I learned a great deal about biology and geography.'
- Was being a scientist what you had always dreamed of?
'No, probably not. For the longest time, I didn't really know what I was going to do. I've had various jobs ranging from retail to bartending and secretarial work. Having said that, I've always enjoyed fieldwork, analysing and putting things together and learning about how things work. When I was doing my undergrad, GIS was still very rudimentary at universities. It was actually a pretty boring course to take because it was very theoretical on many levels. Eventually, I was admitted to a small college in Nova Scotia, and that completely changed my life. It was nine months of intense GIS and I learned all the technical aspects of it. From there I was one hundred per cent employable, and my GIS skills earned me several consultancies in Brunei and finally a position at a research station in Colombia.'
- Have you always been an educator at heart?
'I think, on one level, yes. As a kid, I played school with friends and I always taught English [laughs]. Later on, in the research environment in Colombia, we had a lot of Master's students coming in and I liked to help them with their questions. And when I was working in Scotland I set up little educational workshops. So yes, I think that I've always liked to not only learn things but pass them on to others. As an associate teaching professor at Penn State University, I spent most of my time teaching working professionals in an online environment. Depending on what your needs are, I think online learning is a good way to continue to learn. If it's done well many students will get a lot out of it.'
- How did ITC get onto your radar?
'In my world, ITC is very well known because of the geospatial. I'd known about them for a long time, so when they advertised the position of professor I was excited to apply. The current climate in the US was also a factor. Plus, I thought it was time for my kids to be exposed to other cultures. As it turned out, I had to meet lots of criteria. They were looking for someone with a solid background in education and diversity in research. I fitted the bill in that sense because geospatial can be used in many different ways and across disciplines. I think I also owe a lot to my experience at Penn State, where I had to manage some of the capstone projects that Master's students are required to do. It was a process that involved matching students up with advisors in their domain fields. On my part, this required a wide breadth of understanding, because of the variety of topics the students were studying. This has given me a much broader insight and the ability to pull into the depth of geospatial by connecting it across different disciplines. I think it all helped in my being admitted as full professor at ITC.'
- What have you been up to so far at ITC?
Over the past two years, we have been busy setting up the GeoHealth community at ITC. This involved bringing together different faculty colleagues working on a variety of geo-health topics. We have been busy working on a range of topics related to COVID. Such as assessing travel measures, viral concentrations in wastewater as an indicator of incidence to examine diffusion and spatial and temporal variations of disease incidence and how these can be used for designing intervention strategies such as accessibility of covid vaccination centers.
In addition, we launched our geohealth course that integrates the health and the geospatial science domains last year and we are busy designing more courses for our specialisation which will hopefully be up and running in 2023. If you are interested in learning more about geohealth, join our talk series - the GeoHealth Hour that we started earlier this year.
- What about your research activities?
'The research that I've been concentrating on, besides the Geo-health specialization, concerns exploring the potential of online education. We ran a survey from both a student and a staff perspective on how the online transition in teaching went when the lockdown happened. We could see what worked well and what didn't work well, and identify what the challenges were, what we could fix and what we couldn't fix. This involved infrastructure issues, internet connections and the like. I've just finished analysing that and overall I think the results are pretty positive. The students seem to enjoy learning online. They felt they were able to continue learning despite what was going on. A lot of the staff were very motivated to continue to deliver quality education and learned many new skills. For me, it was fascinating to see what people did and learned and to also identify the missing pieces. When you develop online courses, there are certain features that you have to set up in a different way. The difficulty is in the interactions and being able to accept at what level those interactions are going to take place.'
- How do you like being a full professor?
'To me, being appointed as a full professor demonstrates your skillsets and accomplishments. It's a recognition that you are knowledgeable on certain things.
I'm now in the process of finding the balance between my roles in Geo-health and education. I'm still trying to find out what the expectations are when it comes to my educational focus. There needs to be more conversation to develop that. One of the challenges has been, because of Covid, meeting everybody. In online contacts, you don't pick on nuances and miss those little conversations between meetings. So, all in all, I'm still trying to figure out my exact position.'
- Have you liked living in the Netherlands so far?
'We arrived in the Netherlands in June 2020 and we're loving it here. One of the first things we did was buy bikes. It's been liberating to not have needed a car. My kids also cycle to school and field hockey on their own, which is nice, because then we don't have to take them anywhere. Another thing that has struck me is how great the food tastes. The strawberries, my goodness, they were the tastiest strawberries we had had in a very long time. In the US they pick them early and then freeze them to keep them. They're just not as tasty. I'm also slowly picking up my Dutch again. Having lived in Surinam as a child I was fluent once, but now I haven't spoken it for 40 years. That's another challenge for the new year.'
- Where can we learn more on Geo-Health?
Check out our website to learn more about geo-health. For information about our talk series visit the GeoHealth Hour website. For those interested in taking the geo-health course, please check out this page.
