Abstract Deadline: ~November
Full paper Deadline: ~November
Description:
The Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group (HMGSG) of the AAG invites current undergraduate and graduate students to submit their work to the specialty group’s annual Peter Gould Student Paper Competition. The competition is meant to promote written scholarship by students across the field. The prize will be awarded in each of two categories: 1) undergraduate students, and 2) graduate students (Master’s and Doctoral). Both awardees receive an official certificate and a cash award of $200 (graduate students) or $100 (undergraduate students).
Eligibility:
The competition is open to currently enrolled undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level students. Papers must be completed in the past 12 months prior to the submission deadline. Papers that were previously submitted for consideration for this award are not eligible. Papers published prior to the abstract deadline (including successfully defended theses and dissertations) will not be considered. Papers can be either single-authored or co-authored. For co-authored papers, the student should be the first author and responsible for over 80% of the analysis and writing. For a co-authored paper, a statement signed by the student and advisor regarding the student’s contribution (including percentage) is required. Membership in the American Association of Geographers and HMGSG is required. Students cannot submit to both the Peter Gould award and the Jacques May thesis competition in the same year.
Submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the HMGSG Awards Committee. Selected abstracts will be invited to present at a HMGSG sponsored hybrid session during the AAG Annual Meeting. Winners will be selected based on their written paper and oral presentation. Papers will be judged by external reviewers and the HMGSG Awards Committee on several criteria: originality, scholarship, organization, appropriate use of methodology, written composition, and oral presentation. Finalists are required to present at an AAG HMGSG sponsored hybrid session for the Peter Gould Student Paper Award. We will offer both in-person and virtual presentation options.
Submission & Review:
The timeline for the competition is as follows:
1. AAG Abstract Submission Deadline (~November): An extended abstract (500-word limit) of your paper is due. The abstract should clearly state the purpose, methodology, and findings of the research. You will need to submit this to Shamayeta Bhattacharya (sbhattacharya@pointpark.edu). Once you have submitted to AAG, you will get a Personal Identification Number (PIN) for 2025 AAG, which you should also send to Shamayeta Bhattacharya (sbhattacharya@pointpark.edu) as part of your submission for this award.
2. Selection of Extended Abstracts and full paper submission (~November): The Awards Committee selects the best extended abstracts (undergrad, grad) for submission of full papers. You will receive notification about the Awards Committee decision by this date. Your full paper must be electronically submitted to the paper coordinators by midnight Eastern US time.
3. Presentation at the AAG Meeting
4. Award Announcement: Winners will be announced at the HMGSG business meeting. Winners will receive monetary prize. Results of the competition will also be published on the HMGSG website.
Requirements:
The final full paper must include a 500-word abstract and be no longer than 5,000 words for graduate students or 3,000 words for undergraduate students (excluding tables, references, and captions). Authors are also encouraged to submit the names of at least 3 possible reviewers who are not affiliated with the research. Ensure that the purpose, methodology, and findings of the research are clearly stated in the abstract. The body of the paper should be double-spaced, 12-point font size and one-inch margins, with page numbers. Remove any identifying information (e.g., name). References should be in AAG style. Submit the paper as a single PDF file with all figures and tables included in the document. Include a title page without author information within this PDF document. Students presenting their papers should plan on a 10-minute presentation with 5 minutes of questions from the audience and review committee.
Submission of the extended abstract and final paper will be done electronically as an email attachment to the Paper Coordinators (contact information below). Include the following information in the body of the email message: Your full name, address, email address, department and university affiliation, name of advisor or mentor, and title of the paper. Please put “HMGSG Peter Gould Student Paper Competition” in the subject line. Email your submissions to TBD.
Previous winners include:
| Name | Year | Paper Title | Institution | Type |
| Haoxuan Peter Ge | 2025 | Assessing Environmental Beauty and Safety Perception Impacts on Type-2 Diabetes Across Toronto | University of Toronto | Graduate |
| Jiashuo Sun | 2025 | Geographic Barriers to Vaccine Access: Associations of Travel Time with COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake, Intent, and Perceived Availability in Kenya | University of Hong Kong | Undergraduate |
| Weixuan Lyu | 2024 | Beyond Spatial Proximity: Conceptualizing the Perceived Food Activity Space | University of Connecticut | Graduate |
| Sophia Arabadjis | 2023 | Wildfire Evacuation Exposure and Cardiac Risk on California’s Central Coast | UC Santa Barbara | Graduate |
| Rebecca Richards Steed | 2022 | Evidence of transgenerational effects on autism spectrum disorder using multigenerational space-time cluster detection | University of Utah | Graduate |
| Changzhen Wang | 2022 | Delineation of Cancer Service Areas Anchored by Major Cancer Centers in the USA | Louisiana State University | Graduate |
| Yanzhe Yin | 2021 | A dynamic hyperlocal heat exposure index based on human mobility patterns | University of Georgia | Graduate |
| Lirong Kou | 2020 | Listening to Urban Sound: Understanding Human Mobility, Individual Sound Exposure, and Psychological Well-Being | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | Graduate |
| Junghwan Kim | 2019 | Examining the Neighborhood Effect Averaging Problem (NEAP) in People’s Exposure to Mobility-Dependent Environmental Factors: A Spatiotemporal Modeling Approach | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | Graduate |
| Arianna Marie Planey | 2019 | Hearing Health Care In The United States: A Multi-Scale Spatial & Political Economic Analysis of Health Care Policy and Access to Audiology Services | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | Graduate |
| Seungwon Kim | 2018 | University of Iowa | Graduate | |
| Meifang Li | 2018 | Sun Yat-sen University | Graduate | |
| Ian Kracalik | 2017 | Impact of livestock vaccination policy changes on the epidemiology of human anthrax | University of Florida | Graduate |
| Kathleen Weimer | 2017 | The Geography of US Cesarean Sections: Spatial Distributions of Rapidly Changing Health Standards | University of Colorado | Undergraduate |
| Sandy Wong | 2016 | Geographies of Medicalized Welfare: Spatial Analysis of Supplemental Security Income in the U.S., 2000-2010 | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | Graduate |
| Claire Hofius | 2016 | Vaccination and Risk: The influence of environmental and social risk of vaccination refusal in California | Macalester | Undergraduate |
| Caitlin Henry | 2015 | Hospital Closures: The Sociospatial Restructuring of Labor and Health Care | University of Toronto | Graduate |
| Madeline Hinchliffe | 2015 | Measuring Perceptions of Collegiate Students to Assess Shampoo Purchasing Decisions | University of Oklahoma | Undergraduate |
| Jessica Finlay | 2014 | Biopolitics of Active Aging: Strategies to Redefine Later Life | University of Minnesota | Graduate |
| Yoo Min Park | 2014 | A spatially filtered multilevel model to account for spatial autocorrelation: application to self-rated health status in South Korea | Korea University | Graduate |
| Lilly Alexander | 2014 | The ecology of poverty of Chagas Disease in the United States: The invisible population of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands | Macalester College | Undergraduate |
| Rory Horner | 2013 | Rising powers as harbingers of public-health oriented patent law? The Indian pharmaceutical industry and economic geographies underlying health | Clark University | Graduate |
| Michael Widener | 2012 | An agent-based approach to modeling food desert policy interventions to improve the nutrition of lower-income urban residents | University of Buffalo | Graduate |
| Jennifer Alexander | 2012 | Analysis of models using deforestation and malaria case and incidence rates for prediction of malaria in the Amazon region of Brazil | University of Texas at Austin | Graduate |
| Antony Chum | 2011 | Policy implications of neighbourhood effects on health research: towards an alternative to poverty deconcentration | University of Toronto | |
| 2010 | No winners | |||
| Christine Chung | 2009 | Risk factors of young females to HIV/AIDS in Jamaica | Macalester College | Undergraduate |
Health and Medical Geography 