UCGIS is pleased to announce that David M. Mark has been selected as the recipient of its 2009 Education Award. Dr. Mark is a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo (UB), the State University of New York, and is the Director of the Buffalo site of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). Mark also is Project Director of the University at Buffalo’s two NSF-funded Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) projects in Geographic Information Science, projects that together have supported more than 60 doctoral level trainees in GIScience, in seven academic departments.

Mark has advised or co-advised 18 completed Ph.D. students and more than 40 Master's. Counting his advisees, mark has served on the PhD advisory committees of more than 100 Doctoral students. Mark also has written or co-authored almost 230 publications, including more than 80 refereed articles, 5 edited books, 30 book chapters, 69 conference proceedings articles, and more than 40 technical reports. He has made almost 230 academic presentations, almost three-quarters at professional meetings, and the others as invited talks at universities and government agencies. He was awarded the UCGIS Research Award in 2004.

Mark was involved in the founding of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, and later served as President of the UCGIS (1998). He also has chaired the UCGIS Research Committee and Policy and Legislation Committee. Previously, Mark served as Vice-chair (1987-88) and Chair (1988-89) of the Geographic Information Systems Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers and Chair of the Technology Interest Group, Canadian Cartographic Association (1987-89). He also has served on numerous international editorial boards and program committees, and was program co-chair for Auto Carto 10 (1991), COSIT'99, COSIT'05, and GIScience 2000 and 2002.

Mark's research interests have involved digital elevation models, hierarchical data structures, navigation and wayfinding, qualitative spatial reasoning, and geographic cognition. For more than 20 years his work has focused on cultural and linguistic variation in geographic concepts, more recently in the context of ontology and indigenous geographies.