The Department of Geography mourns the death of Paul Talbot, a former graduate student who received his PhD in 2004. Paul died on December 6th, 2014 in Champaign, Il. He had been in a coma for 9 years after a car accident in Thailand where he was working after he completed the dissertation. Paul obtained an undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois and arrived in ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ in Fall 1994 to study political geography and the transition from Communism in Russia. After completing the MA degree with a thesis on Russian parliamentary elections, he returned to Russia for a couple of years before coming back to ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ to start his PhD work. Using funding from a NSF dissertation award, he conducted a nationwide survey of Russians on their beliefs about the break-up of the Soviet Union and their preferences for a geopolitical arrangement involving Russia and its neighbors. Some of the key results were published in Eurasian Geography and Economics in 2005. Paul was also a highly successful and popular graduate part-time instructor in introductory human geography and advanced political geography classes.
After a stellar high school running career, Paul was on an athletics scholarship and won Academic All Big 10 honors in 1992-93 for the University of Illinois. He ran in the Bolder ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ multiple times with a best time of 35 minutes in 1995 and he loved to discuss/debate the pros and cons of various training schemes, shoe designs and national team programs. He was also a very talented poker player.