About the Program

The Mission

This GIS Population Science program has a primary mission to significantly promote the mastery and use of spatial methods in population research by the current cohort of young population scientists. In support of this mission, the Population Research Institute (The Pennsylvania State University) and the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (University of California, Santa Barbara) have combined their expertise to offer national workshops for Ph.D. students, postdocs, and young faculty in demography and in related fields with research interest in population science. In addition, the program is developing web-based infrastructure for access to learning and research resources by workshop participants and by the broader international community of population scientists.

The Target Audience

Two-week-long GIS Population Science workshops will be offered in 2005 and 2006 to provide standardized, intensive training for young researchers in geographic information science specifically tailored toward population science. The primary audience for these workshops are interdisciplinary pre-doctoral students of demography at NICHD-supported population training centers in the United States, institutional members of the wider Association of Population Centers (APC), graduate students in demography-related disciplines from both APC and non-APC institutions (including agricultural economics, anthropology, economics, geography, public health, rural sociology, sociology), as well as young faculty and researchers employed in population agencies.

Host Organizations and Program Funding

The Penn State and UCSB partnership builds on shared expertise in GIS instruction, spatial statistics, and cartographic visualization; shared experience in workshop and conference management; and complementary expertise in demographic science, distance learning, and digital libraries. See About for more information.

The GIS Population Science program is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) as an R25 award titled "GIS Training Program for Population Scientists" (R25 HD047744-01). The support of NICHD is gratefully acknowledged.