Friday, October 21, 2016

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Jen Ziemke, (Ph.D., Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison), is Co-Founder & Co-Director of the International Network of Crisis Mappers, Co-Curator of the International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM) series &  Associate Professor of International Relations at John Carroll University. Jen has a deep and almost unexplainable interest in conflicts, wars, patterns, and whether the analysis of these kinds of data can tell us something (however small) about war. She carried out a comprehensive data-driven study of the Angolan civil war. For this project, she coded and geo-referenced some 10,000 battle and massacre events spanning all 41 years of this war using hundreds of sources and a detailed exhumation of Portuguese-language newspaper archives. Her 2008 dissertation From Battles to Massacres details this work.  Jen serves as Co-Founder & Co-Director of the International Network of Crisis Mappers, the world’s largest and most active international community of experts, practitioners, policymakers, technologists, researchers, journalists, scholars, hackers and skilled volunteers engaged at the intersection between humanitarian crises, technology and rapid mapping. Reuters AlertNet named Crisis Mapping one of its Top 20 Big Ideas in 2011. She also manages and hosts an international conference event, the ICCM, held in Manila (2016),  New York (2014), Nairobi (2013), the World Bank (2012), Geneva (2011), Harvard (2010), and Cleveland (2009). She also served as a Crisis Mapping and Early Warning Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and was named a 2013 recipient of the University of Michigan’s LSA Humanitarian Service Award, presented annually by the Dean to 3 living alumni in recognition of their work. She teaches courses on conflict processes, African politics, research methodology, international security, and international relations, as well as courses on crisis mapping and new media. Jen received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Political Science) and undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She was a Peace Corps volunteer on the Namibian side of the Angolan border from 1997-1999. Jen has hitchhiked 20,000 miles in over a dozen African countries and has lived and worked in various places around the world.

Sunday, October 23, 2016