Professor Mike Goodchild has been awarded the Prix Vautrin Lud, regarded by many as Geography’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The international award is named after a 16th Century French map maker who is credited as being the first to name the New World “America” on a map (exactly 500 years ago in 1507, in honor of the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci; detail at right is from the original which is in the Library of Congress). The award will be presented at this year’s Festival Internationale de Géographie (FIG), held in the French town of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges where Vautrin Lud was born. The prestigious annual award is given to a scientist or scientists who has/have significantly advanced the field of geography, and Mike becomes the 19th scholar to have won it. Previous recipients include Peter Haggett (UK), 1991; Torsten Hägerstrand (Sweden) and Gilbert F. White (USA), 1992; Peter Gould (USA), 1993; Milton Santos (Brazil), 1994; David Harvey (UK), 1995; Brownish Roger and Paul Claval (both from France), 1996; Jean-Bernard Racine (Switzerland), 1997; Doreen Massey (UK), 1998; Ron Johnston (UK), 1999; Yves Lacoste (France), 2000; Peter Hall (UK), 2001; Bruno Messerli (Switzerland), 2002; Allen Scott (USA), 2003; Philippe Pinchemel (France), 2004; Brian J. L. Berry (USA), 2005; and Heinz Wanner (Switzerland), 2006.
Professor Goodchild received a BA in Physics from Cambridge University and a PhD in Geography from McMaster University. He joined the UCSB Department of Geography in 1988, and he has served as Chair of the Department (1998-2000); chair of the Executive Committee of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis since 1997; Associate Director of the Alexandria Digital Library Project since 1994; Chair of the Mapping Science Committee, National Research Council, 1997–1999; and Director of NCGIA’s Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science since 1999. His research interests include urban and economic geography, geographic information systems, and spatial analysis. Considered the father of GIScience, Goodchild’s many honors include being elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2002, being awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 2003.and being elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.
Mike was selected as the recipient of the Prix Vautrin Lud by an international committee last May, and he will receive the award at FIG on October 4th. Needless to say, the entire department, as well as the university, is extremely proud of Mike’s achievements and honored that our “laureate” has decided to stay at UCSB, despite overtures from Harvard.
Article by Bill Norrington
