Larry Gorenflo
Associate Professor

229 Stuckeman Family Building • University Park, PA • 16802
ph: 814.863.5337• email:ljg11@psu.edu

Education:
BA (Highest Distinction) Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University, May 1979.
MA, Anthropology, University of Michigan, August 1981.
PhD, Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, December 1985.
Full CV

Interests

Larry Gorenflo was appointed Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Penn State in 2007. Between 1999 and 2007 Dr. Gorenflo worked at The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International, in both cases conducting research to identify human impacts on biological diversity and opportunities for biodiversity conservation. Since 1994, he has maintained a relationship (as staff and as a consultant) with Argonne National Laboratory, where he led and contributed to a series of environmental impact analyses. Dr. Gorenflo has advanced degrees in anthropology and geography, and has conducted research and published in applied demographics.

Professional Background: Dr. Gorenflo has conducted research on the interface between the human and natural environments for more than 25 years. This research has focused on prehistoric, historic, and living peoples, and has involved a range of quantitative methods and tools that include structural mathematics, statistics, and geographic information system (GIS) technology. Fieldwork has emphasized Latin America, particularly Mexico, but includes North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania. Additional experience, through various research efforts, includes Europe and Asia. He has held positions in academic institutions, consulting firms, a national laboratory, and non-government organizations, and maintains professional affiliations with the Environmental Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and the Center for Applied Biodiversity Conservation at Conservation International.

Teaching: Dr. Gorenflo currently focuses his teaching efforts on methodology, particularly GIS applications to landscape architecture, and theory, emphasizing landscape ecology and cultural aspects to landscape design and implementation. The aim of much of his teaching is to help students design landscapes that are aesthetically appealing as well as ecologically and culturally functional.

Research: Most of Dr. Gorenflo’s research involves biodiversity conservation, in an effort to help understand the current and future impacts of human population and behavior on plant and animal species and to identify opportunities for conserving these species and the natural habitat upon which they rely. The geographic emphasis of this work often is Latin America and the Caribbean, though an increasing focus on the conservation of freshwater biodiversity and on the integration of development and conservation leads to research opportunities in other parts of the world as well. He maintains an interest in the prehistory of central Mexico, where he applies GIS and other methods to help understand the evolution of settlement patterns, regional adaptation, and complex societies in the Basin of Mexico. He will return in the next two years to research on the demography of Micronesia to update a series of studies published in the 1990s, extending those inquiries geographically and topically to consider biodiversity conservation in addition to other development challenges. Research in domestic settings emphasizes the demographics, settlement, and the built environment of Tribal Peoples in the United States, including Alaska.  Methodological interests continue to involve the development and application of analytical approaches to analyze the human use of geographic space at varying scales.