UCSB Geography alumnus Matt Rice (Ph.D., 2005) has been awarded a prestigious IC Post Doctoral Research Fellowship for 2005-2008. The fellowship, worth $359,000, is distributed in $120,000 renewable annual fellowship stipends. The fellowship provides money for research, travel, computer equipment, and faculty research support. Rice’s research award proposal, prepared with Principal Investigator Michael Goodchild, is titled “Rapid Interpolation Methods and Accuracy Models for SRTM Digital Terrain Elevation Datasets.” The research explores new methods for delivering interpolated elevation values and associated error estimates from high-resolution global elevation datasets. The SRTM Digital Terrain Elevation Data, produced jointly by NASA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA, formerly NIMA), have become important foundational data for scientific projects in the federal government and the scientific community. Matt’s research will be supervised by Dr. Goodchild and will be based at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) at UCSB. The research will also be coordinated through the NGA, which is funding the award.
Matt’s 2005 award is one of approximately 20 such fellowship awards given annually to eligible researchers from the science and engineering disciplines.
