THE AGS COUNCIL FELLOWSHIP
The councilors of the American Geographical Society created the AGS Council Fellowship to support graduate student scholarship in pursuit of geographical knowledge, and especially fieldwork. The fellowship is open to all student members of the American Geographical Society, both Masters and Doctoral students, studying at colleges and universities in the United States. Each fellowship is worth $2,000. The AGS Council Fellowships Program considers all proposals concerned with any sub-field of geography. The program encourages but does not require a fieldwork component. We encourage fellowship recipients to publish their results in one of our journals.
The Council Fellowships for 2025-2026 have been awarded. Information on applications for the 2026-2027 award cycle will be posted in the Fall of 2026.
Click the image of the awardee to access a press release about their prize.
Ms. Khostajeh Hashemi
2026
Ms. Hashemi will use the fellowship to fund her research project, Modeling the Relationship Between Built Environment and E-scooter Ridership at the Street Segment level in Washington D.C. She wrote, “To address existing data gaps, this study focuses on Washington, D.C., applying machine learning to trip flow at the street segment level to examine how built environment, and safety factors influence e-scooter ridership. The analysis will identify the relative importance of key variables, providing actionable insights for infrastructure design, policy, and data-driven micromobility planning.” She remarked, “I am deeply thankful to the American Geographical Society for supporting my research. I look forward to sharing my findings with urban planners, policymakers, and transportation planners to help promote more sustainable and multimodal transportation systems.”
Mr. Matthew Hiett
2026
Mr. Hiett will use the fellowship to fund his research project, Urban Morphology and Neighborhood Delineation in Chicago’s Real Estate State. He wrote, “Streets, plots, and buildings cohere into a durable urban morphology that sorts accessibility, capital flows, and opportunity. My dissertation asks whether the physical characteristics of urban form create neighborhood boundaries that organize patterns of investment, displacement, and gentrification.”He remarked, “I am grateful to the American Geographical Society for supporting this work. The fellowship will directly fund fieldwork and data acquisition in Chicago, connecting the computational analysis central to my dissertation to the material city. Understanding how physical urban form and policy interact to produce neighborhood change has real implications for how we study and govern cities, and I am both glad and honored to pursue that question with the AGS Council's support.”
Ms. Mahboobe Safaei Mehr
2026
Ms. Safaei Mehr will use the fellowship to fund her mixed-methods research project, Contraceptive Deserts and Maternal Mortality in Texas: A Feminist Approach to Investigating Reproductive Healthcare. She remarked, “Overall, this research offers an interdisciplinary and justice-oriented contribution to geographic scholarship by demonstrating how reproductive healthcare inequalities are spatially produced, maintained, and contested. By linking contraceptive deserts to maternal mortality and situating these patterns within feminist, demographic, and geospatial frameworks, the project advances geographic understandings of health inequality and supports evidence-based strategies aimed at improving maternal health outcomes in historically underserved communities across Texas.” She wrote, “It is a great honor to be awarded the AGS Fellowship. This opportunity allows me to further my research on maternal mortality and inequalities in reproductive justice in Texas, and to highlight the spatial dimensions of reproductive healthcare access. I hope my work contributes to a deeper understanding of health disparities and promotes more equitable outcomes in healthcare.”
Mr. Monojit Saha
2026
Mr. Saha will use this fellowship to fund his project, When Satellites Can't See: Bridging the Near Coastal Sea Ice Monitoring Gap in Arctic Indigenous Communities. He wrote, “This research asks: Why are near coastal Arctic regions excluded from satellite monitoring, and can we develop community validated methods to close this critical data gap? Beginning from the premise that current systems reproduce geographic inequality by providing excellent coverage of uninhabited central Arctic waters while excluding inhabited coastal regions, this project develops improved methods for extending reliable monitoring into near coastal zones that matter most to Arctic peoples.” He remarked: “As a broadly trained geographer now specializing in polar science, receiving the AGS Council Fellowship from the American Geographical Society is an incredibly meaningful opportunity. This support allows me to bridge geographic perspectives with polar research, and I am deeply grateful for AGS’s commitment to nurturing interdisciplinary and field-driven scholarship.”
