Daniel A. Griffith

At the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Griffith is an Ashbel Smith Professor within the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences. He also served as the Associate Program Head of the Geospatial Information Sciences Program for ten years. His primary areas of research are in spatial statistics, quantitative urban and economic geography, and spatial epidemiology, and he teaches about spatial statistics and spatial econometrics, GIScience research design, and urban economics. UCGIS is pleased to welcome him into the cadre of Fellows.

Professor Griffith has contributed in substantial ways to the development of fundamental theories within geography, regional science, and geographic information science. He is a spatial modeler par excellence, specializing in spatial autoregressive models, useful for the analysis of econometric problems. He contributed strongly to the development of the technique of spatial filtering which is used for solving complex spatial problems and he has enabled many scholars to incorporate these techniques into their own research. Despite the complexity of the theoretical frameworks in which his work is immersed, his enthusiasm for the tools and techniques have fueled their uptake across many disciplines.  His work is both broad and deep in terms of its focus and impact – while many of his publications have focused on the development and validation of new statistical techniques for the analysis of spatial data, others have applied these techniques to a variety of important social problems such as disease transmission and various forms of environmental degradation.

The long list of honors bestowed on Professor Griffith speaks strongly to the impact he has made. His awards range from the 1980 AAG Nystrom Award for his dissertation research to his 2016 Founder’s Award from the International Spatial Accuracy Research Association. He has been named a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2017), Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2015), and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2011). These major awards demonstrate the broad reach his work has had beyond the Geography and GIScience community. He has also served UCGIS in several capacities, including as an active delegate while at several different institutions, and as a contributor to white papers and the GIS&T Body of Knowledge.