Marc Armstrong

 At the University of Iowa, Dr. Armstrong is a Professor, Collegiate Fellow, and Associate Dean for Research and Infrastructure. His primary interest areas are GIScience theory and applications, high-performance computing, spatial analysis, and cartography. Furthermore, Dr. Armstrong’s contributions to the mission of UCGIS, to further research and development in the field, is exemplary. His contributions to the UCGIS organization include his service on the Board of Directors and his ongoing and steady support for UCGIS through participation in its events and activities throughout its entire history. UCGIS is pleased to welcome him into the cadre of Fellows.

Dr. Armstrong’s research and contributions to GIScience began with building and using GIS for environmental applications. He led the system development for one of the first implementations of GIS for productive work in the early 1980s. His work focused in database organization, decision making, geographic information analysis, and display. He has also conducted theoretical research in visualization and spatial representation. He was one of the early researchers to recognize the need and use of parallel computing approaches for spatial data and problems. Dr. Armstrong’s seminal research in grid and distributed computing for geospatial data began early in the 1990s, but became mainstream in the early 2000s, where he led grid computing innovation in GIS with his research in algorithms and architectures for parallel computational solutions. This work was foundational to the current use of parallel and distributed GIS processing systems. His recent work has focused on the application of geospatial processing and analysis concepts in health and other domains, as well as exploration of aspects of geo-privacy and the history of cartography and geospatial technologies.