Michael F. Goodchild is Professor of Geography at the University of
California, Santa Barbara; Chair of the Executive Committee, National
Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA); Associate Director
of the Alexandria Digital Library Project; and Director of NCGIA's Varenius
project. He received his BA degree from Cambridge University in Physics in
1965 and his PhD in Geography from McMaster University in 1969. After 19
years at the University of Western Ontario, including three years as Chair,
he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988. He was Director of NCGIA from 1991 to
1997. In 1990 he was given the Canadian Association of Geographers Award
for Scholarly Distinction, and in 1996 the Association of American
Geographers award for Outstanding Scholarship; he has won the American
Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Intergraph Award and twice won
the Horwood Critique Prize of the Urban and Regional Information Systems
Association. He was Editor of Geographical Analysis between 1987 and 1990,
and serves on the editorial boards of ten other journals and book series.
His major publications include Geographical Information Systems: Principles
and Applications (1991); Environmental Modeling with GIS (1993); Accuracy
of Spatial Databases (1989); GIS and Environmental Modeling: Progress and
Research Issues (1996); and Scale in Remote Sensing and GIS (1997); in
addition he is author of some 300 scientific papers. He is currently Chair
of the National Research Council's Mapping Science Committee. His current
research interests center on geographic information science, spatial
analysis, the future of the library, and uncertainty in geographic data.