Melinda Laituri

Melinda Laituri

Associate Researcher
Nov. 2020 - Oct. 2023
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Dr. Melinda Laituri is a professor of geography in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability at Colorado State University. She is the Director of the Geospatial Centroid at CSU that provides support for geospatial research and teaching across the university. She is a Fulbright Scholar having taught GIS at the University of Botswana and conducted research in the Center for Scientific Research, Indigenous Knowledge, and Innovation on participatory mapping and conservation planning. Professor Laituri is a Rachel Carson Fellow for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximillian University, Munich.  Laituri is a founding member of the Environmental Justice Working Group in the School for Global Environmental Sustainability at CSU.  She is a former visiting scientist at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University.  Professor Laituri is a former National Science Foundation program officer in Geography and Spatial Sciences. Laituri was a Jefferson Science Fellow where she was the principal investigator on the Secondary Cities Initiative, part of the State Department’s Office of the Geographer’s Humanitarian Information Unit mapping rapidly growing under-examined cities. She is currently the principal investigator on the Department of State’s Cities’s COVID Mapping and Mitigation program. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona in Geography and held a three-year tenure track position at University of Auckland, New Zealand before joining Colorado State University.  Dr. Laituri teaches the graduate GIS courses at CSU emphasizing the use of GIS in research applications.  She integrated spatial literacy into her undergraduate watershed science courses and at the CSU Mountain Campus field-based course.