Six Geography graduate students have been awarded Dangermond Travel Stipends this summer. The funds are used to enable students to present GIS-related work at conferences and workshops. Congratulations to the following applicants and many thanks to Jack and Laura Dangermond who established this fund for the UCSB Department of Geography:
- Gargi Chaudhuri who will attend the Geocomputation 2011 conference in London, July 20-22, and give an oral presentation titled “Temporal limits to urban growth modeling.”
- Elizabeth Garcia who will attend the Ecological Society of America (ESA) Annual Meeting in Austin, TX, August 7-12, and give a poster presentation titled “Streamflow responses to potential changes in coniferous forest species composition and climate warming in the Western U. S.”
- Brett Hartman who will attend the Society for Ecological Restoration 2011 World Conference on Re-Establishing the Link Between Nature and Culture in Merida, Mexico, August 21-25, and give an oral presentation titled “Do check dams really work? The efficacy of watershed management programs in restoring rangeland, seep, and wet meadow systems in the highland Andes.”
- Indy Hurt who will attend the Esri Educational and concurrent International User Conferences in San Diego, July 9-15, and give a presentation titled “Configuring ArcGIS Server for use in a classroom environment.”
- Grant McKenzie who will attend the Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2011) in Belfast, Maine, September 12-16, and give an oral presentation titled “Cognitive Engineering for Mobile GIS.”
- Yihong Yuan who will attend the International Symposium on Spatial-Temporal Analysis and Data Mining (ISPRS SDTM’11) in London, July 18-22, and present a paper (co-authored by Martin Raubal) titled “Extracting clustered urban mobility and activities from georeferenced mobile phone datasets.”
Jack Dangermond and his wife Laura co-founded the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), a privately-held Geographic Information Systems software company, in 1969. Dangermond founded ESRI to perform land use analysis, but 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.
To quote a thank you letter to Jack and Laura Dangermond from our past Chair, Oliver Chadwick, “Your generosity re the annual Dangermond Travel Awards, the annual Dangermond Graduate Fellowship and Dangermond Undergraduate Scholarship Awards, and the annual Dangermond Lecturer Series – not to mention funding for periodic GIS workshops – has had a major impact on the Department over the past 10 years. The past decade has seen the Department grow in terms of its physical size, its academic quality, and the multidisciplinary scope of its impact on critical issues concerning the relation of man to his environment. Established gift funds such as yours are even more vital to the Department in these times of economic duress, and I’d like to make sure that you know how much we are beholding to you and to ESRI.” Amen!
