Keith ClarkeThe Education Committee of UCGIS is pleased to announce that the recipient of the UCGIS Educator Award for 2003 is Professor Keith Clarke. Keith is currently the Department Chair of the Department of  Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Keith strongly meets the four criteria for this award: Excellence in teaching GIScience courses, supervision of graduate students, authorship of Giscience textbooks, and leadership in the development of education policy.

Keith is an outstanding teacher of GIScience, and he regularly teaches 150 undergraduate students, drawn from all majors, in the large, introductory GIScience course at UCSB. He has obtained a high level of success in the introductory courses and may be said to have defined the GIScience service course. Keith has also advised a steady stream of graduate students over the past 20 years, and he is known as a motivating advisor who supports his students and encourages them to maximize their capabilities and interests. He is the author of an important introductory textbook, now in its 4th edition, that is one of  the most popular undergraduate texts in the field. It is an excellent text, combining human interest and technical information, in a book that gives students the motivation to learn more about the field.

Keith also contributed to the development of education policy during his recent term as President of the ACSM cartographic association where he undertook a number of GIScience education initiatives, including addressing issues of accreditation and certification.

Keith Clarke is a research cartographer and professor. He holds the B.A. degree with honors from Middlesex Polytechnic, London, England, and the M.A. and Ph. D. from the University of Michigan, specializing in Analytical Cartography. He joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1996. Dr. Clarke's most recent research has been on environmental simulation modeling, on modeling urban growth using cellular automata, on terrain mapping and analysis, and on the history of the CORONA remote sensing program. Dr. Clarke is the former North American Editor of the International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, and is series editor for the Prentice Hall Series in Geographic Information Science. He is the author of the textbooks, Analytical and Computer Cartography (Prentice Hall, 1995), Getting Started with GIS (1997) and about eighty book chapters, journal articles, and papers in the fields of cartography, remote sensing, and geographic information systems. In 1990 and 1991 Dr. Clarke was a NASA /American Society for Engineering Education Fellow at Stanford University, and in 1992 served as Science Advisor to the Office of Research, National Mapping Division of the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. Since 1997, he has been the Santa Barbara Director of  the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis.