Heejun Chang. Photo credit: PSU-ISS.

This summer, the AAG journal The Professional Geographer will see a change in editorial leadership. Barney Warf has completed two terms as editor of The Professional Geographer and is succeeded by Heejun Chang, who assumed editorship of the journal on July 1, 2019.

Heejun Chang is a professor and outgoing chair of the department of geography at Portland State University. His publication record is extensive having published 131 peer-reviewed articles on topics related to hydrology, water resources, human modification of the environment, and environmental change, his areas of expertise. Heejun has experience with publication in a wide variety of journals, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and is regarded as a high quality peer reviewer, an accolade for which he received an excellent reviewer award from Journal of Hydrology. He has also served as guest editor for special issues of Climate and International Journal of Geo-Information.

Heejun’s vision for his term as editor of The Professional Geographer is one of diversity, inclusion, and innovation. He sees the journal as a premier location for bridging traditional divides among human, physical, and GIS scholarship and hopes to foster a balance in submissions from the various facets of the geographic discipline. Heejun believes that encouraging more cross-generational scholarship as well as manuscripts co-authored with practitioners will help to cultivate fresh ideas within the discipline and that The Professional Geographer can play a key role in circulating these debates. Lastly, as the AAG has become more international in its membership, Heejun welcomes scholarship from the global geography community including academics from the global south or whose primary language is not English.

The AAG would like to express their heartfelt thanks to Barney Warf for his hard work over the last eight and a half years. Under Barney’s editorship scholarship published in The Professional Geographer maintained high quality and rigor while engaging academics and practitioners worldwide.

The Professional Geographer, published four times a year, features a range in content and approach from rigorously analytic to broadly philosophical or prescriptive. The journal provides a forum for new ideas and alternative viewpoints.