Francis Koti
FDI Scholar in the Department of Geography and Regional Planning
Born sixth in a family of seven as Tama Koti, in Mithumo village of Machakos District in the Eastern Province of Kenya, and later (1980) adopted Francis as my first name after baptism. In 1998, I wedded Margaret Koki, and we are the proud parents of Milton Koti.
I hold a Bachelor of Education (Hons) degree from Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya, with specialized training to teach Geography and History, which I did at the Aga Khan High School, Nairobi, between 1991 and 1996. I then moved to the United States for further studies and acquired a Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in Geography from West Virginia University (WVU) in 1999. I am currently a Ph.D candidate in Geography program at WVU. My research interests are African Peri-Urbanization, African Urban Management and Planning, Third World Development, and GIS and Society issues. My dissertation research examines how the introduction of geographic information systems (GIS) in African urban geographic research is impacting the way peri-urban landscapes are understood and conceptualized. Using a GIS and Society framework, the study also examines how the integration of community local knowledge into a conventional GIS for (uneven) residential development in Athi River town, Kenya, might augment such spatial databases, rendering them more place-based and robust for use in policy evaluation and planning. Towards the end of this summer, I will leave for Kenya to conduct fieldwork, and I hope to complete my Ph.D program in the summer of 2003.
Besides teaching High School in Kenya, I have acquired college teaching experience here at WVU as a graduate instructor with full teaching responsibility for Physical Geography (Spring 2001) and Urban Geography (Spring 2002). I have also served as a graduate teaching assistant in courses such as Physical Geography, World Regional Geography, Human Geography, and Introduction to GIS. This spring, I was named the graduate teaching assistant for the Geography Program for 2002. In the past year, I have been a graduate research assistant for the UCGIS-HUD sponsored project here at WVU where we are developing a quantitative baseline of spatial data for the City of Beira, Mozambique, using geographic urban indicators, a United Nations initiative for cities of developing countries.
I am a holder of the 1999 Eberly College of Arts and Sciences (WVU) Endowed Doctoral Teaching Supplemental Fellowship. I am affiliated to the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the UCGIS-HUD sponsored Urban Indicators Project here at WVU, the WVU Appalachia-Southern Africa Research and Development Collaboratory (ASARD), and the WVU African Students Association (ASA) where I served as vice president in the 2000–2001 academic year.
