President’s Report
June 21, 2005

Since I took over as President in February 2005, I have been fortunate in getting enormous help on UCGIS matters from many of you. Jack Sanders, our Executive Director, and Lynn Usery, our Past President, have been a constant source of information and counsel. Carolyn Merry, our past past president, is never off the hook and has generously provided her time for UCGIS. Douglas Richardson, our Treasurer, and Richard Campbell, our Webmaster, continue in providing their superior service and help making every transition easier.

Since February, John Wilson, our President-elect, and Gregory Elmes, Scott Mackay, and Mei-Po Kwan joined the Board with May Yuan, Sean Ahearn, and David Tulloch. Tim Nyerges, Tom Cova, and Jane Read took over as Chairs of Research Committee, Research Projects Committee, and Communications Committee, respectively. Laxmi Ramasubramanian recently succeeded Elizabeth Wentz as Secretary. Together with David DiBiase, John Shuler, Mary Lou Larson, Benjamin Zhan, and Tarek Rashed, existing chairs of Education Committee, Policy & Legislation Committee, Membership Committee, and Young Scholars Committee, we have a distinguished group of committed professionals helping to move GIScience forward. On behalf of UCGIS, I thank all of you for your professionalism and contributions to UCGIS in various ways. In addition, many members volunteered information and advice, to whom I am thankful but regret for not listing you all in this brief report.

We had a very successful winter meeting/congressional breakfast in February in Washington, DC, in which health and GIS was the theme. We look forward to the upcoming summer assembly to be held from June 28 – July 1, 2005 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Consortium. The summer assembly will be a good opportunity for us to learn and to reflect on GIScience research and education, as well as to exchange ideas on how UCGIS might strategically position itself to serve our members and the society even better in this rapidly changing GIS landscape.

We are currently working on developing means of collaboration with similar organizations, including USGIF (United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation) and its Academy, GISCI (GIS Certification Institute), CaGIS (Cartography and Geographic Information Society), and FGDC (Federal Geographic Data Committee). UCGIS now has representatives serving on the accreditation panel of the USGIF Academy as well as on committees of FGDC. Through these various collaborations we hope to further enhance our effectiveness in achieving our missions and goals that will benefit the broader community.

Within UCGIS, the NSF-funded SPACE workshop project, which is collaboration between UC Santa Barbara, Ohio State University, and UCGIS, is now in its second year. Richard Legates and his team at San Francisco State University represented UCGIS in organizing the second year’s workshop. The third-year workshop will be run by Tarek Rashed and his team at University of Oklahoma. A proposal for a visualization workshop has been submitted by May Yuan and Karen Hornsby to NSA (National Security Agency), which will involve a number of UCGIS members. Negotiations with the USGS for the postdoctoral position and with other organizations for student internships continue.

One of my goals as President is to look for ways to increase funding opportunities for GIScience research and educational activities and to support UCGIS to further its service to its members. In advocating increased funding for GIScience research (with educational benefits), I have made several contacts with NSF program directors, pleading the need to develop a focused and sustained program for funding GIScience research at NSF. While it is difficult to make changes very soon, I hope some groundwork has been laid.

I have just come back from a workshop on “the Crossroads of GIS and Health Information: Moving Ahead to Improve Cancer Control”, which was organized by the National Cancer Institute and the National Library of Medicine. Many of the issues and challenges identified in the workshop could lead to call for proposals in a year or so and are relevant to our members, including for example the need to develop spatial tools for handling uncertainties and spatio-temporal analysis; the need to develop a one-stop portal (cyberinfrastructure) for data, tools, and references; and the need to fund centers of excellence that have critical mass of multi-disciplinary scientists to develop theoretical and practical GIS studies. UCGIS member universities are by definition multi-disciplinary, but it is important that we position ourselves by cultivating genuine collaboration to compete for funding, not just from one agency, but also from many other sources.


Nina Lam