Most of us find thinking and talking about garbage unpleasant.

But for Christa D. Jensen, a West Virginia University Regional Research Institute graduate research fellow, garbage—particularly hazardous waste—is a welcomed subject that dominates most of her waking thoughts.

Her unusual drive to examine and make sense of the various facets of hazardous waste is one of the reasons she was honored at the 51st Southern Regional Science Association Meeting in Charlotte, N.C. in March.

Jensen’s excellence in scholarly work in regional science was recognized by a panel of academicians and researchers who chose her paper as the winning entry for the 2012 Barry M. Moriarty Student Paper Award. Her paper, “Examining Sub-national Waste Flows in the United Kingdom: A Spatial Interaction Approach,” investigates the relationships that exist within the origin-destination flows of hazardous waste.

The focal point of Jensen’s paper is the intranational hazardous waste shipments over which a national government has complete jurisdictional authority, placing her research outside the mainstream of conventional research that continues to target international trade.

“Trade in hazardous wastes has traditionally been modeled as the one-sided relationship that exists between management /disposal location and various destination-specific characteristics,” Jensen said. “My paper takes a closer look at both sides of the origin-destination relationship and uses a spatial interaction approach to analyze the regional characteristics responsible for hazardous waste flows between 57 districts in the United Kingdom.”

Jensen explained that global economic activity has dramatically increased the generation of hazardous waste. At the same time, the fear that some individuals have that a disposal site will be located near them has intensified and become more widespread. She points out that this scenario has made it increasingly difficult to find waste disposal locations and has given impetus to the creation of a global market for waste transportation and disposal. It has only been in recent years that this market has become the focus of government regulation and academic research.

RRI Director Dr. Randall W. Jackson said, “I am not surprised that Christa won this award. Christa is without question the best student I’ve had the privilege to work with in nearly 30 years. She is that rare type of graduate student who takes ownership of her research projects. She has all of the qualities that make for an outstanding and successful scholar. She is creative, productive, enthusiastic, motivated, exceptionally bright, and a pleasure to work with. In short, she is the kind of student we all wish we could clone and populate our programs with.”

Jensen, who is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at WVU, will defend her dissertation, “The Three Ws of Hazardous Waste: Who, Why, and Where?” on Friday (April 13) from 9 a.m. to noon in the RRI conference room on the 5th floor of the Chestnut Ridge Research Building. Her defense is open to the public.

-WVU-

gg/04/09/12

CONTACT: Caigan McKenzie, Regional Research Institute
304.293.2897, Caigan.McKenzie@mail.wvu.edu

Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.