Humboldt State University Geography Professor Stephen Cunha, Director of the California Geographic Alliance and latter-day Marco Polo of "living geography," has won a prestigious California State University Wang Family Excellence Award of $20,000.
Dr. Cunha, who has traveled to every corner of the planet including Polo's "Roof of the World" in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan in Central Asia, is one of five 2007 recipients of the prize, established in 1998 by then-CSU Trustee Stanley T. Wang, who provided $1 million to reward outstanding faculty and administrators. A Trustee from 1994-2002, Mr. Wang is founder, president, and chief executive officer of Pantronix Corp., Fremont, CA., a provider worldwide of semiconductor manufacturing services.
On receiving the award, Dr. Cunha exclaimed, "I'm stunned! The work is very familiar to me, I live with it every day, and I see the flaws. And then to be recognized at this level is a feeling like no other."
He described himself as "an ordinary geographer who has worked in extraordinary places:Yosemite, Alaska, Myanmar [the former Burma ], the Pamirand they instilled in me a deep passion for the work."
A professor at Humboldt State since 2001, Dr. Cunha is the second consecutive HSU faculty member to win the Wang Award. Dr. Eugene Novotney, an internationally recognized scholar and founder of the renowned HSU Calypso Band, received the award in 2006.
Dr. Cunha is an indefatigable evangelist of geographic and environmental literacy; since arriving in Arcata, his Cultural Geography class has grown by leaps and bounds, from 40 to 340 students a year. His Mountain Geography course jumped from 20 students to 50. He kicked off his Environmental Conservation course with 30 students and now enrolls more than 100.
Under his leadership, the California Geographic Alliance involved more than 11,000 California teachers in various activities in 2005, ranging from a half-day to more than a week. Through his application, the alliance has garnered more than $1.5 million in grants to advance geographic literacy and education in the state. The alliance and its partners successfully applied last year to the David & Lucille Packard Foundation and the National Geographic Society for a $1 million start-up endowment, to allow these educational efforts to continue in perpetuity.
Since the inception of the National Geography Bee in 1989, Dr. Cunha has worked closely with the National Geographic Society to develop, execute, expand, and coordinate the contest. California now has the largest Bee in the nationmore than 100,000 of the state's fourth through eighth graders compete each yearled by Professor Cunha as state coordinator. He assists schools, presides over the state final each spring, and maintains the state office here in Arcata.
Dr. Cunha is the author of The Official Study Guide to the National Geographic Bee and co-author of Our Fifty States, which both appeared on the Amazon.com Children's Best-Seller list. The Bee took on international scope in 2000 and today involves more than 18 countries.
Elsewhere on the global stage, Dr. Cunha continues his work with the Tajik government (Tajikistan was part of the former Soviet Union, which dissolved in 1991). His contributions through field work and scholarly and popular publications are recognized as among the keys to the promulgation of a 2002 legislative decree that established the Tajik National Park.
This year the Tajik government applied for a Pamir World Heritage Site and Professor Cunha has consulted on Pamir mountain hazards, provided testimony on Tajik refugee asylum cases, and worked with humanitarian organizations to alleviate chronic food shortages in Gorno-Badakshan. He co-authored the Environmental Action Plan for Central Asian States in 1994 and it still guides United States aid to the region.
A busy consultant and the recipient of numerous awards and two dozen grants, Dr. Cunha also won this year's Hilda Taba Award for Outstanding and Enduring Contributions to Social Science Education in California, presented by the California Council for Social Studies.
In 2001, he received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the National Council for Geographic Education. HSU's College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences conferred an Innovation Award & Grant in 1998.
"To a huge extent, the Wang Award reflects the work of others," Professor Cunha said, "including California Geographic Alliance personnel, colleagues here and in Central Asia, the HSU students who spur us onward and keep this job so interesting, and my own University advisors."