Rud Platt is a professor of environmental studies and director of the GIS lab at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses in remote sensing, GIS, and environmental science.  Rud’s research broadly relates to land systems science, the study of land cover and land use as a coupled human-environment system.  He is particularly interested in the dynamics of the Earth’s wildland-urban interface (WUI), including the relationships between wildfire hazard, forest management, land use change, and climate change. His study areas are situated within the Rocky Mountain West, the Marcellus Shale Region of Pennsylvania, and the Terai Arc Landscape of India.  Rud received his Ph.D. Geography from CU Boulder in 2004 and is currently a visiting scholar at the CIRES Earth Lab.