Professor Heejun Chang’s interest in water and climate started when he was spending time in his backyard stream as a child. Located in the foothills of the Bukhan Mountains in northeastern Seoul, Korea, the stream provided ample opportunities to experiment with various water projects. He once created a small dam to divert stream water to a pond, which caused the water level to fluctuate throughout the year. While he did not know the exact terminologies such as groundwater seepage or evapotranspiration, Professor Chang acquired a basic understanding of the water budget and erosion and sedimentation processes associated with rainfall intensity and duration.

Professor Chang’s interests in water and climate eventually led to a Ph.D. degree at the Pennsylvania State University. Joined by interdisciplinary and international scholars at Penn State’s Environment Institute, he worked on various projects including constructing a distributed hydrologic model and interactions of water quality and climate change in Pennsylvania and Bulgaria, while learning advanced visual spatial analysis skills.

After obtaining his Ph.D. in 2001, Professor Chang joined PSU as an assistant professor. Since then he has launched several projects in the Pacific Northwest and Korea to investigate various aspects of hydrological processes in the context of climate change and land use change and to develop education materials on teaching quantitative methods. The National Science Foundation, the Korea Meteorological Administration and Portland State University currently fund his research projects. Professor Chang’s work has been cited in numerous papers and reports, including the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Report on Climate Change 2005.

Professor Chang has worked to revise and update the Geography department curriculum by adding several courses in his areas of interest. He developed four new courses in sustainability science and spatial analysis, which fulfill the university and the department missions in internationalization, sustainability, and community service. Professor Chang perceives that teaching, research, and service are not mutually exclusive. He incorporates his research findings into his classroom and assigns research projects for students based on topics of current interest in water resources and climate change. Professor Chang often invites guest speakers from the community in his classroom so that students obtain up-to-date information in the field. He welcomes students who would like study any aspect of water and climate.

Name: Heejun Chang
Title: Assistant Professor, Geography
office: 424I CH
phone: 503-725-3162
email: changh@pdx.edu
web address: http://www.geog.pdx.edu/~changh/