Introducing GIS for Undergraduate Social Science Courses

August 1-6, 2005: San Francisco, CA

Instructor Bios

Richard LeGates is the project PI. He is a professor of Urban Studies where he teaches interdisciplinary social science and research methods courses. He received a joint JD/MCP degree from U.C. Berkeley in Law and City Planning in 1968/69. Professor LeGates is the author of Thinking Globally/Acting Regionally: Spatial Analysis and Data Visualization for Social Science and Public Policy Research (Redlands: ESRI Press, forthcoming 2005). He is the PI for a $431,000 NSF Educational Materials Development grant to develop instructional modules to introduce spatial analysis (GIS) and data visualization into undergraduate research methods and data analysis courses. He is the co-editor of a widely-used interdisciplinary anthology-The City Reader 3rd ed (LeGates, 2003) and co-series editor of the Routledge Urban Reader series.

XiaoHang Liu is the project co-PI. She is an assistant professor of Geography and Human Environmental Studies where she teaches GIS and data analysis courses, including the department's "Introduction to GIS" and "Geographic Techniques" courses. Professor Liu received her Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Santa Barbara with a focus on GIS, remote sensing, and spatial statistics. She also holds degrees in Computer Science and Environmental Science. She is currently conducting research on health impact assessment and health disparities mapping in collaboration with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, S.F. Planning Department, SFSU Economics Department, and University of California San Francisco.

Barry Nickel is the Associate Director of the SFSU Institute of Geographic Information Science. He manages the IGIS research program, directs the SFSU Certificate Program in GIS, supports GIS curriculum development activities, and oversees GIS-related examinations and assessment. He received a M.A. in Biology (Ecology and Systematics) from SFSU in 2003 and is currently conducting research on the foraging ecology of marine mammals.

Ayse Pamuk is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies where she teaches interdisciplinary social science, data analysis, and policy analysis courses and a visiting scholar at U.C. Berkeley's Institute of Urban and Regional Development. She received a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from U.C. Berkeley in 1994. Professor Pamuk is the author of GIS Methods in Urban Analysis (Redlands: ESRI Press, forthcoming 2006) and co-PI for the NSF EMD grant. Her current research focuses on spatial analysis of immigrant clusters in U.S. and world cities-and has been published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (Pamuk, 2004).