Dr. Diana Sinton is awarded University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Fellow status in recognition of her substantial academic scholarship and leadership as well as her impressive contributions to community building and UCGIS. Diana has long recognized the importance of spatial thinking and its active role in learning. Her research has considered how and why GIS and spatial thinking are linked differently for novices and experts, something that she highlighted in her 2013 book, The People’s Guide to Spatial Thinking. She also studies how GIS and GIScience have become established and matured within higher education overall. Over her career, her strong commitment to advancing GIScience education and research has earned significant funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the national Institute for Museum and Library Services, and several private foundations in support of her work.

Dr. Sinton specializes in how GIScience and GIS are taught and learned in both formal and informal environments, including the context of professional development. She currently oversees the evaluation and knowledge transfer activities for the NSF-funded I-GUIDE project: Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment, working with PI Shaowen Wang at the University of Illinois. Under her direction, the UCGIS Geographic Information Science and TechnologiesBody of Knowledge (GIS&T BoK) has emerged as a highly regarded and widely accessed source of authoritative content that underlies multiple curricular and workforce development credentials. Building connections between the UCGIS BoK and the counterpart European efforts was the focus of her recent Fulbright award activity. She played a key role in the University of Chicago’s GLOW project, GIS Librarians for Open Workflows, that addressed the career concerns of GIS support and research staff based in academic libraries. GLOW was just selected by Esri to receive a 2024 Special Achievement in GIS Award.

Diana is best known for her ongoing achievements in GIScience community engagement. In the NSF-funded TRELIS-GS (Training and Retaining Leaders in STEM – Geospatial Sciences) project, Diana worked with a team to enhance and improve career experiences and pathways for academic women working in the geospatial sciences. The resulting professional network has been considered highly empowering by many early- and mid-career scholars. At the same time, Diana regularly reaches out beyond the traditional academic GIScience community as she builds bridges to leaders in spatial cognition, the learning sciences, the federal government, the GIS industry, other geospatial non-profit organizations, and cognate disciplines. During her 8-year tenure as the UCGIS Executive Director, she established and renewed multiple cooperative agreements with partner and sister organizations to ensure that GIScientists - and GIScience - would always have a seat at the table. For all she has accomplished, UCGIS is very pleased to name Dr. Diana Sinton as a UCGIS Fellow.