Brian J. L. Berry

 Brian J. L. BerryUCGIS is pleased to announce that Dr. Brian J. L. Berry, the Lloyd Viel Berkner Regental Professor in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, has been selected to receive its 2021 Research Award.  Berry’s achievements in spatial analysis, with an early emphasis on the regional sciences, have been transformative to our discipline. Over his lengthy career, Dr. Berry has also earned accolades such as his 1975 election to the US National Academy of Sciences (at that time, the youngest person ever to have been selected), his 1976 election to become Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, followed by becoming a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989. In 2005 he was named Lauréat of the Prix International de Géographie “Vautrin Lud” (considered by some as Geography’s Nobel Prize).

In 1964, Berry first wrote about the geographic matrix, an analytical conceptualization of a computer aided form that arguably was a predecessor of the GIS attribute table. Berry’s geographic matrix aided the evolution of GIScience in surpassing technical topics and issues, promoting an appreciation of the conceptual and functional linkages between GIS and GIScience's emerging intellectual core. A measure of the significant impact of the geographic matrix has been both the number of times that journal articles have been dedicated to its discussion and the span of time that this innovative contribution continues to be influential in research, persisting to the present time, almost 60 years since its original publication and promotion. This constitutes a profound influence of the geographic matrix on the theory and/or practice of GIScience vis-à-vis geographic information technology. Berry’s groundbreaking spatial analysis work in methodological and theoretical GIScience developments over many decades, epitomized by his fundamental and innovative contribution of the geographic matrix to GIS, are proving to be long-lasting transformative geospatial research contributions.

UCGIS will honor Brian Berry and other award recipients as part of its Symposium 2021 programming activities.