An unprecedented number of Jack and Laura Dangermond Travel Scholarships have been granted for the 2013 Spring and Summer quarters. Thanks to the generosity of Jack and Laura Dangermond, multiple travel expense awards are available to help qualified undergraduate and graduate Geography students present GIS-related work at conferences and workshops each quarter.
Twelve of the latest 17 awards are related to attending the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, April 9-13, 2013. Awardees include graduate students Mike Alonzo, Helen Chen, Kitty Currier, Frank Davenport, Kate Deutsch, Song Gao, Yingjie Hu, Jay Lee, Kevin Mwenda, and Yihong Yuan, all of whom will be presenting papers. Recent alumnae Felicia Bill and Mark O’Connor were also given travel awards for the AAG to allow them to present a poster they created while seniors majoring in Geography last Fall.
Mike Alonzo, who received an AAG award, also received a second grant to allow him to present a paper at the RIEGL LIDAR 2013 International Airborne, Mobile, Terrestrial and Industrial User Conference 2013 in Vienna, June 25-27. Daniel Ervin will be giving three presentations at The International Geographic Union Kyoto Regional Conference (Kyoto; August 4-9); Shane Grigsby will be attending PyCon 2013 (Santa Clara; March 13-21) to present “Spatial clustering in Python”; Grant McKenzie will attend the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe conference in Leuven, Belgium, May 14-17, to present “A Thematic Approach to User Similarity Built on Geosocial Checkins”; and Antonio Medrano will present “Improved upper bounds for a two-phase biobjective shortest path algorithm” at the 22nd International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making in Malaga, Spain, June 17-21.
UCSB Geography’s relationship with the Dangermonds and ESRI goes back to around 1979-1980 when the Department got its first ArcInfo license (source). As Professor Emeritus Mike Goodchild once pointed out, “It is easy to underestimate the influence of ESRI and its leader on the subsequent development of GIS. The company, formed by Jack and Laura Dangermond to advance environmental design, has grown over four decades into the dominant force in the GIS industry with a worldwide employment of roughly 5,000. While design remains its compelling vision, the company supplies software for a vast array of applications, supporting local government, utilities, the military and intelligence communities, resource management, agriculture, and transportation” (source). UCSB Geography students are acutely aware of “the influence of ESRI and its leader” and have benefited greatly from the Dangermond Travel Awards, as well as from other major funding by Jack and Laura Dangermond over the years.
Editor’s note: Details of Dangermond Travel Awards during the past few years can be found here.
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