Building Things That Matter:

• New Academic UnitsThroughout my career I have watched trends and tried to organize and build academic units that seized the opportunities at hand. This started early for me because of some weird mix of forethought and luck – I saw Arc/Info Version 2.0 (the predecessor to ArcGIS Version 10.3) at a GIS/LIS Symposium in Dallas, Texas in 1986 and saw immediately the possibilities for building new geography courses and an organized research unit focused on spatial modeling around these kinds of platforms. A few years later, I gathered the necessary funds, designed and authored a series of classes, and founded the Geographic Information and Analysis Center at Montana State University which I directed from 1989 to 1997.

  I moved to the University of Southern California in 1997 and founded the GIS Research Laboratory that I have directed from its inception to the present-day. The field has changed a great deal in the past 20 years and the lab has changed with it. Hence, much of our work today is focused on web services and mapping as well as various kinds of spatial modeling because some of the early tasks (like building geospatial datasets has (fortunately) that took tremendous time and effort have faded into the background).

  The field of geographic information science has grown tremendously in terms of both breadth and depth during this period. The work of pioneers (like Luc Anselin, Peter Fisher, Michael Goodchild, and Shaowen Wang, among others) along with the emergence of the spatial turn – which has swept through the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities – and computational advances spawned by colleagues in both the computer science and information technology fields has helped to spawn this growth. Whatever the explanation, I personally have come to view geographic information science as an enabling discipline (much like statistics has become during my lifetime) and with this in mind I founded the USC Spatial Sciences Institute on 1^st July, 2010.

  Housed in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the USC Spatial Sciences Institute looks outward and endeavors to promote and support spatial ways of knowing across the academy. I believe that there many scholars and students across a swath of disciplines who would benefit from looking at their topics through a spatial lens from time to time and so we need academic programs that simultaneously introduce large numbers of scholars and students to the spatial sciences on the one hand and train relatively small numbers of spatial scientists on the other hand! The new academic programs I have crafted seek to achieve both of these outcomes – as is explained below.

• New Academic Programs Building research units like the Geographic Information and Analysis Center at MSU and GIS Research Laboratory at USC provide modest vehicles for training students and building new academic courses and programs. To achieve a large and lasting impact, one needs to build new academic degree programs that anticipate where science and technology are heading and the kinds of opportunities and needs these developments are likely to spawn.

  The launch of the Spatial Sciences Institute on 1^st July, 2010 followed several years of planning and the goal was to create a nimble, outward looking academic unit that could seize a number of opportunities to build a series of interdisciplinary academic degree programs and then create the technological and intellectual base to support these programs.

  I started by writing curriculum and accreditation proposals to launch an online M.S. in Geographic Information Science & Technology (GIST) to complement an online Graduate Certificate I had designed and launched in 1998 soon after joining the USC Department of Geography. The new GIST M.S. has flourished since the first students were recruited in Fall Semester 2010 and we have recently added new Graduate Certificates in Geospatial Intelligence and Geospatial Leadership as well as a GeoHealth track in the Keck School of Medicine’s online Master of Public Health (MPH) degree program. We have already graduated 60 GIST M.S. degrees and 200 GIST Graduate Certificates and we continue to explore pathways that would extend our reach across complementary disciplines and application domains.

  I next started thinking about and designing an interdisciplinary B.S. in GeoDesign degree program. Encouraged by the success of the online programs and realizing that geographic information science (and my own work for that matter) had spent too much time and effort focused on describing and explaining what was wrong with the world, I was lucky enough to attend a presentation by Carl Steinitz at Esri in 2011 and it got me thinking about what one would need to do to create undergraduate degree programs that would help students think of solutions (as well as problems) and simultaneously help them to select their career and graduate education goals. The new B.S. in GeoDesign degree launched in Spring Semester 2014 draws roughly equal amounts of material from architecture, planning and the spatial sciences, and is the first degree of its kind in the world. The concept is simple – the School of Architecture leads the design elements of the program, the Price School of Public Policy provides the planning frameworks around which both collective and individual action (creativity) can be promoted and sustained, and the USC Spatial Sciences Institute provides the spatial platform or stage on which scientific knowledge is gathered and assembled to address the opportunity at hand. The student response has been fantastic and we currently have 15 geodesign majors just a year out from the official launch of this exciting new interdisciplinary degree program. The future is promising – with the second geodesign class scheduled with UNIGIS colleagues in Europe this May and a new collaborative classroom scheduled for completion by the end of Summer Semester, 2015.

  I am now busy putting the finishing touches on curriculum proposals and the various administrative tasks that will be needed to launch a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Population, Health and Place in Fall Semester, 2016. Built on roughly equal contributions from the Department of Preventive Medicine, the Department of Sociology, and the Spatial Sciences Institute this new degree program will aim to produce a new kind of scholar and leader – one who is cross-trained in public health (biostatistics, exposure science, epidemiology, etc.), sociology (population science, social capital, etc.) and the spatial sciences (mapping, spatial analysis and modeling) and thereby positioned to help find and implement solutions for the world’s most complicated and enduring challenges and opportunities related to environmental sustainability, social justice and human well-being. This new program, which will be administered by the Spatial Sciences Institute and leverage its rapidly evolving and expanding computational platforms, may well be the first program of this type in the world and the challenge will be to build it out in ways that spawn new and substantial collaborations among the new PHP doctoral students on the one hand and the participating faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and undergraduate students on the other hand. I look forward to leading this effort and are thankful to Deans Steve Kay (Dornsife College) and Carmen Puliafito (Keck School of Medicine) for the support they have committed to this effort.

• New Outlets I have found throughout my life and career that serendipity has a way of lending one a helping hand. Back in 1993, I was asked by Michael Goodchild to organize and lead a session that asked whether or not we needed a second international, peer-reviewed academic journal focused on geographic information science at the Second International Conference on GIS and Environmental Modeling. Following this conference, I authored a proposal to launch a new journal and the inaugural issue of Transactions in GIS was published in January, 1996. The name was chosen with a particular goal in mind – the desire to establish a journal that spanned fundamental science as well as applications – and therefore an outlet that provided a permanent repository for both articles describing fundamental scientific advances and best practices. I have served as the Editor-in-Chief from the outset and we will publish the first issue of volume 19 in just a few weeks from now. The journal has grown in size and stature during the past 20 years (six issues are published per year nowadays compared to just four issues in the first few years and the journal was assigned an impact factor of 1.00 in 2014, up 60% over the previous year). The mission has changed little since its inception and today Transactions in GIS aims to publish original research articles, review articles and short technical notes on the latest advances and best practices in the spatial sciences, where the latter includes all of the different ways in which geography might be used to organize, represent, store, analyze, model and visualize information. That said, the opportunity to launch and shape this journal and help guide the best manuscripts to publication are two of the best things I get to do from one week to the next for the past 20 years and counting

Building Successful Collaborations
The best collaborations are those where the sum of the parts is more than the parts themselves. These opportunities occur in a variety of ways but the best usually involve faculty colleagues and students, as explained below

Working with Faculty Colleagues

A quick glance at my publications will indicate that I have been lucky enough to work with many wonderful colleagues over the years. Indeed, there are too many to mention by name, but let me say that I have come to realize in the past couple of years that my role in such collaborations is changing quickly. I chose to go to Montana State University in 1984 because I loved the landscapes and I saw tremendous opportunities to gather expertise and guidance from a trio of senior faculty – Steve Custer, Gerry Nielsen, and Robert Taylor. Each was influential and all three played key roles in my early successes in both fundraising and publishing. My hope is that I gathered sufficient knowledge and wisdom over the past 30 years that I might switch my role in these kinds of collaborations going forward – one in which I assume the role of senior scholar and guiding hand and seek out young scholars like Jordy Hendrikx (Department of Earth Sciences, Montana State University) and Kelly Sanders (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Southern California) to build new and novel collaborative research projects.

Working with Students

A quick glance at my publications will indicate that I have also published many book chapters, journal articles, and conference proceedings papers with graduate students over the past three decades. I chose an academic career so I could work with students and the “value proposition that has accompanied this choice gets better with the passage of time. I have never tired of teaching nor guiding student research projects and look forward to many new opportunities to do this using the new degree programs we have created in the USC Spatial Sciences Institute in the years ahead.