Society of Woman Geographers

Abstract: The State Department’s Office of The Geographer plays a leading role across the U.S. Government in promoting the value of geography and advancing its use as an approach for understanding and informing senior policymakers about real-world challenges. Our expertise and analysis range from informing foreign policy decisions on global issues to engaging communities on geographic science. In this presentation, Debbie will highlight issues our analysts have tackled this past year from mapping famine to analyzing wildlife trafficking. Debbie will then discuss the expansion of our Secondary Cities Initiative, a field based project working with communities that are poorly mapped and lack rigorous, publicly-available data sets to support sustainable planning and address urban challenges such as expanding informal settlements, public health emergencies, and natural disasters. Finally, Debbie will explain why human geography is such a hot topic in Washington these days. More on Debbie: Debbie Fugate is the Deputy Director of the Office of The Geographer and Global Issues in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. Department of State. The office provides timely, independent analysis on a range of global issues to inform foreign policy decisions. She co-directs the research and analysis of the office, including work on civilian security, health and environment, human rights, migration and refugees, trafficking, and war crimes. She reports directly to The Geographer of the United States, a position that was established in 1921 and bears the statutory responsibility for providing guidance to all federal agencies on international boundaries and sovereignty. Debbie oversees the Humanitarian Information Unit (HIU), an interagency unit that produces written and visual analytics on humanitarian challenges and complex emergencies worldwide. The HIU employs geographic methods and technologies, serves as an information-sharing node, and manages projects that facilitate the creation of geospatial data. She is also Director of the Secondary Cities Initiative, a field-based program that engages communities to build capacity in geospatial science and open data with partnerships addressing disaster preparedness and urban resiliency in secondary cities globally. Debbie has a Ph.D. in Geography from San Diego State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara with a focus on population analysis and urban remote sensing. Prior to joining the Department of State she served for almost a decade as a demographer for the Central Intelligence Agency, analyzing demographic trends worldwide with a focus on humanitarian, health, and crisis contexts.