Professor Timothy Nyerges of the University of Washington, Seattle, presented the 23rd Annual Golledge Distinguished Lecture on April 13. His topic was “Implementing the PGIST Portal: A Web Portal for Analytic-Deliberative Decision Support,” and he followed it up with an informal “brown bag” lunchtime discussion of “Geospatial Meaning Making in Web Portals” the following day. Dr. Nyerges joins an elite group of Golledge Lecture speakers who have shared their expertise with the Department over the years, the first of which was Julian Wolpert of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs, Princeton University, in 1985. A complete list of the distinguished lecturers can be found here.
The Golledge Distinguished Lecture was instituted in 1984 when Professor Reginald Golledge lost his sight. Without vision, keeping abreast of ongoing research in his fields of interest was a major problem for Reg, so the Department, with backing from Professors Waldo Tobler and David Simonett, established a named Distinguished Lecture Series to enable Reg to invite scholars whose work related to his interest areas to the department for 3-4 days a year and to interact with them personally. Contributions were solicited from the discipline and from Department members, and a fund was set up with the UCSB Development office to help pay the expenses of bringing in such a person. The Golledge Lecture is, indeed, a “distinguished lecture” that is widely recognized across the discipline and is a part of our departmental image, having been one of the academically evaluated dimensions of this department since 1985.
