Seven Geography graduate students have been awarded Dangermond Travel Stipends this year. The funds are used to enable students to present GIS related work at conferences and workshops. This year’s recipients are:
- Guofeng Cao for a presentation of Transition Probability-based Geostatistical Methods for Modeling Categorical Spatial Data at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, April 14-18, 2010.
- Gargi Chaudhuri for a presentation of Urban Growth in a Trans-Border Region at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, April 14-18, 2010.
- Drew Dara-Abrams for a presentation of Environmental Modeling: Using Space Syntax in Spatial Cognition Research at the Spatial Cognition 2010 Conference in Portland, Oregon, August 15-19, 2010.
- Karl Grossner for presenting a poster (Locating and Measuring Spatial Thinking in Text Corpora) and participating in a full-day workshop (Workshop on Spatial Thinking) at AGILE 2010, in Guimãres, Portugal, May 11-14, 2010.
- Linna Li for a presentation of Automatic feature matching in conflation by optimization at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, April 14-18, 2010.
- Shishi Liu for a presentation of The Influence of Soil Moisture Fluctuations on Primary Production in Mediterranean Oak Savanna, Grassland, and Shrubland in California at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, April 14-18, 2010.
- Nicole Simons (in the UCSB – SDSU Joint Doctoral Program) for a presentation of Forest fire severity mapping using satellite imagery and GIS for Carinthia, Austria at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, April 14-18, 2010.
“Jack Dangermond is an American business executive and environmental scientist. In 1969, he co-founded with his wife Laura the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), a privately-held Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software company. In 2009, with an estimated net worth of $2 billion, Dangermond joined the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. Dangermond is the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer and works out of ESRI’s headquarters in Redlands, California. Dangermond founded ESRI to perform land use analysis, however its focus evolved into GIS software development, highlighted by the release of Arc/INFO in the early 1980s; the development and marketing of Arc/INFO positioned ESRI with the dominant market share among GIS software developers. Today ESRI is the largest GIS software developer in the world and its flagship product, ArcGIS traces its heritage to Dangermond’s initial efforts in developing Arc/INFO” (Wikipedia).
In a recent thank you letter to Jack and Laura Dangermond, our Chair, Dar Roberts, commented:
“As the new Department Chair, I want to express my deep gratitude to you for your ongoing generous contributions and support of Geography at UC Santa Barbara. Travel awards such as these are worth far more than the price of an airline ticket and often lead to moments that define us and shape our careers. I look forward to the opportunity to continue to work with you to help the Geography Department and its students flourish.”
Amen!
