DR. DON LAFRENIERE
(Project Director)

I am the Director of the Geospatial Research Facility and Historical Environments Spatial Analytic Lab, and Department Chair in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Tech.  I am a historical geographer and expert in geographic information systems.  I grew up in Windsor, Ontario surrounded by the industrial activities of the automotive industry and have come to appreciate the history and heritage of the Copper Country.  The villages and the industrial remnants around the region provide an amazing laboratory to study our social and environmental history.  My research focuses on building new ways to work with communities and the general public to learn about the history of places through the use of maps and historical data.  I also study the impact of how we build our cities impacts our livelong health, how past people commuted to school and work, and social processes like mobility, segregation, and the creation of strong sense of place
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