Dr. Donna J. Peuquet is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Programs in the Department of Geography at Pennsylvania State University. She has held past positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the State University of New York, Buffalo, and at the U.S. Geological Survey. She has held visiting appointments at the CSIRO Division of Information Technology and Water Resources in Canberra, Australia, at the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), Enschede, Netherlands, and at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University.
Dr. Peuquet has been one of the most influential researchers and educators in GIScience since its inception as an academic field. Her 1977 Ph.D. dissertation at the State University of New York, Buffalo was a milestone in the development of raster-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and led to a number of highly influential journal articles. However, Dr. Peuquet is likely most well-known today for her research on spatio-temporal data models. Dr. Peuquet’s 1988 and 1994 articles appearing in Annals of the Association of American Geographers integrated research in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science with database modeling to develop novel approaches to spatio-temporal representation in GIS. This theoretical perspective was augmented by further articles detailing computational implementations for spatio-temporal data modeling. This theme was extended considerably in her book Representations of Space and Time (Guildord Press, 2002), which is truly a landmark contribution. The book is a shining example of GIScience theory that shows how synthesizing diverse discourses of spatio-temporal representation can help to understand how and why people interpret the geographic world in the manner that they do. This research led the transformation in GIScience toward theoretical approaches and thus towards legitimacy as a sub-field in Geography and other disciplines. More recently Dr. Peuquet has extended this research to spatiotemporal data mining.
Dr. Peuquet has taught countless undergraduate and graduate students GIS in introductory and advanced GIS courses at Pennsylvania State University, University of California, Santa Barbara, and State University of New York, Buffalo. She has advised nearly 20 graduate students and post-docs, many of whom have gone on to prominent professional positions in the GIS industry and faculty positions in Ph.D. granting institutions. With co-author Duane Marble, Dr. Peuquet co-edited one of the first book-length treatments of GIS, Introductory Readings in GIS (Taylor and Francis, 1990), which served as one of the first GIS textbooks in many early university GIS courses.
Dr. Peuquet contributed to the founding of UCGIS through her participation at the very first UCGIS meeting held in 1994 in Boulder, Colorado. Since then, Dr. Peuquet has served as the lead delegate to UCGIS from Pennsylvania State University, on the UCGIS Board of Directors, on the UCGIS Research Committee, on the UCGIS Education Committee, and on the UCGIS Model Curricula Steering Committee. In addition to her contributions to UCGIS, Dr. Peuquet has taken leadership roles in other organizations, including the International Geographical Union (IGU), International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM), and the American Association of Geographers (AAG).
In recognition of her research and education contributions to the field of GIScience, as well as her leadership in UCGIS and other organizations, Dr. Donna J. Peuquet is awarded the status of UCGIS Fellow 2016.