Michael F. Goodchild was the recipient of the 2002 University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Educator of the Year Award. 

Mike Goodchild is a great educator who has impeccable credentials and who has done a great deal to foster and maintain a high standard of excellence in GIScience education. His extraordinary research contributions to GIScience were recently recognized by his election to the National Academy of Science.

Dr. Goodchild's contributions to education have also been outstanding. Mike (with Karen Kemp) created the first model curriculum for GIS in the early 1990s. His recent textbook, Geographic Information: Systems and Science, with Paul Longley, David Maguire, and David Rhine (Wiley 2001) will be the standard in GIS for years to come. His publication list is extremely long in this area, but perhaps of most importance is the edited volumes he has helped prepare in the field of GIScience, the well known two volume set Geographical Information Systems. As a consultant to many academic and government organizations, he has promoted GIScience education. For example, he has been a member of the scientific committee of COSIT, and the Commission on Physical Science, Mathematics, and Applications of the National Research Council.

In addition, he has overseen the work of many doctoral students who have distinguished themselves in the field of GIScience. He is Director of the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS), an organization whose goals are to disseminate by teaching, workshop, institute, and colloquium, the fruits of GIScience research to the social sciences. As Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), he has created and participated in many conferences that have emphasized teaching and learning GIScience. As Director of the Varenius Project and as Associate Director of the Alexandria Digital Library, he has promoted the better understanding and usefulness of GIScience. Currently, he is the editor for the Methods, Models and GIScience section of the geographer?s flagship journal, Annals of the Association of American Geographers and on the editorial boards of a number of journals, such as the Journal of Geographical Systems, that strive to support high levels of scholarship in GIScience.