Earlier this year M. Bogdan Caradima completed his Master’s in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management here in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo. His Thesis, titled “  Multi-criteria suitability analysis and spatial interaction modeling of retail store locations in Ontario, Canada (PDF)”  made some interesting conceptual, methodological, and application contributions. He conceptualized new site and situational criteria for retail location by developing criteria that addressed the accessibility, visualization, and service area of potential locations. His methodology included integrating the spatial interaction model known as Huff’s Model into two criteria that represented total potential retail spending and estimated retail spending under competition for an assessed location. He applied his work to the entire province of Ontario (4.7 million parcels), a feat that required commandeering campus labs and creating a work flow that could handle big data. Bogdan’s thesis work was funded by a MITACS Accelerate Cluster grant and he worked along side Andrei Balulescu, Keith Davey, and Junyi Wang on this research project. Through the MITACS funding Mr. Caradima worked eight months as an intern for a $50 Billion International company, which gave him insights into corporate decision-making and the challenges of reconciling different time-scales in deliverables from corporate and academic research.

Following his graduation he has been doing some consulting for Green Analytics and has been accepted to the PhD program at ETH (Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology) Zurich (Ranked 9th globally by QS Rankings) in the Department of Systems Analysis, Integrated Assessment and Modelling to fulfill an Ecological Modelling position. Mr. Caradima will be funded by the project “Human Impacts on the Composition of Communities in Swiss Rivers” under the guidance of Dr. Nele Schuwirth and Prof. Peter Reichert along with Jakob Brodersen, Christopher Robinson, and Christian Stamm. The project will integrate existing data from several Swiss monitoring programs to analyze effects of multiple stressors on the macroinvertebrate and fish communities in Swiss rivers with multivariate statistical methods. These findings will be used to extend and improve the mechanistic model Streambugs to predict the macroinvertebrate communities in streams.

Bogdan’s training in the Faculty of Environment’s GIS and spatial analysis courses, along with his Masters and personal pursuits, have given him skills in computer programming (java, python, R), spatial statistics, geographical information systems, agent-based modelling, and many other areas that suggest he’s going to have a great and successful time in Zurich.

Your peers in the lab and the faculty in the department and I all wish you congratulations and look forward to hearing about your future work and experiences at ETH and in Zurich.

Congratulations!