Patricia Gober is a professor emerita in the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy and is the founding co-director of the National Science Foundation's Decision Center for a Desert City which studies water management decisions in the face of growing climatic uncertainty in Greater Phoenix.

She is a past president of the Association of American Geographers, a former member of the Population Reference Bureau's Board of Trustees and the Science Advisory Board of NOAA, and former chair of the College Board's Advanced Placement Human Geography Committee. She also served on the National Research Council's Committee on Geographical Sciences. Her most recent book, "Metropolitan Phoenix: Place Making and Community Building in the Desert," was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2006.

She holds an honorary doctorate of science from Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was awarded the Prince Sultan Abdulaziz International Price for Water in 2008. She received the ASU's Faculty Research Achievement Award in 2009 and the AAG's Presidential Achievement Award in 2011.

Designations

• Ph.D. in Geography, The Ohio State University
• M.A. in Geography, The Ohio State University
• B.S. in Geography, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

• K. L. Larson, Dave D. White, Patricia Gober, and Amber Wutich (2015) Decision making under uncertainty for water sustainability and urban climate change adaptation. Sustainability http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/11/14761.
• Howard S. Wheater and Patricia Gober (2015) Water Security and the science agenda. Water Resources Research, 51(7): 5406-5424.
• Patricia Gober and Howard S. Wheater (2015) Debates-Perspectives on Socio-Hydrology: Modeling flood risk as a public policy problem. Water Resources Research, 51 (6): 4782-4788.
• Chuang, Wen-Ching, and Patricia Gober (2015) Predicting Hospitalization for Heat-Related Illness at the Census Tract Level: Accuracy of a Generic Heat Vulnerability Index in Phoenix, Arizona (USA). Environmental Health Perspectives, 123(6): 606-612.
• Seung-Jae Lee, Heejun Chang, and Patricia Gober (2015) Space and Time Dynamics of Urban Water Demand in Portland, Oregon and Phoenix, Arizona. Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, 20(4): 1135-1147.
• Patricia Gober, Graham E. Strickert, Douglas A. Clark, Kwok P. Chun, Diana Payton, and Kristin Bruce (2015) Divergent perspectives on water security: Bridging the policy debate.The Professional Geographer 67(1): 62-71.
• Elmira Hassanzadeh, Amin Elshorbagy, Howard S. Wheater, and Patricia Gober (2014) Managing water in complex systems: An integrated water resources model for Saskatchewan, Canada. Environmental Modelling & Software, 58: 12-26.
• Patricia Gober and Howard S. Wheater (2014) Socio-hydrology and the science-policy interface: A case study of the Saskatchewan River Basin. Hydrology and Earth System Science, 18: 1423-1422.

• Water resources management, decision making under uncertainty, urban climate adaptation