This award provides support for Dr. Alexander Murphy through the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Program. The objective of this program is to provide research support for some of the nation's most outstanding and promising young science and engineering faculty members. The awards are intended to improve the capability of U.S. academic institutions to respond to the demand for highly qualified scientists and engineers for academic and industrial research and teaching. This award will allow Dr. Murphy to continue his research in political geography on evolving regional structures and ideologies in the Europe and other parts of the globe. He plans to pay special attention to development of critical locales within the European Community, starting with Brussels, a city that has played a central role in the integration of Western Europe and that likely will undergo dramatic transformation in the next decades. In addition to studying the role and relationships of specific places within dynamically redefined regions, the investigator also will examine the concentration of power within central institutions that exert great influence within regions, and he will explore the implications of such concentrations on human use and misuse of the natural environment. Studies of regional structures and water allocation in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. will be followed by analyses of water use and pollution in along the Scheldt River of north central Europe, thereby enhancing understandings of the environmental impacts of regional restructuring.
