Dr. Henk Scholten ESRI Lifetime Achievement Award

05 August 2009, 8:15pm

Redlands, California — August 5, 2009 — During the Plenary Session of the 29th Annual ESRI International User Conference, Dr. Henk J. Scholten received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the advancement of geographic information systems (GIS).

ESRI president Jack Dangermond presented the honor, saying, "With this award, ESRI recognizes Dr. Scholten's accomplishments as one of the first adopters of GIS technology in the world and a prolific author of books on spatial analysis."

Scholten has been involved in GIS education and project implementation for more than 25 years. He is a professor of spatial informatics at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and president of UNIGIS International, a network of universities that work cooperatively to provide distance learning for the design, development, and delivery of GIS. He is also director of the spatial information laboratory (SPINlab) at the university, which carries out various research projects on the use of GIS in land-use management, climate change, health care, and mobile fieldwork.

In 1985, Scholten and Dr. Evert Meijer cofounded Geodan, an international geospatial consulting company that provides services to the European Union as well as other public and private agencies. In his role as director of Geodan, Scholten has been supervisor on a large number of national and international GIS projects and is an adviser for ministries in several countries. The company is currently working with Microsoft and ESRI to implement a nationwide, geospatially enabled system in the Netherlands. The system is being designed to provide a geospatially enabled common operational picture (COP) for the many responders working in the highly complex communications environment that ensues when a disaster strikes.

Scholten has written various articles about GIS for publication in international books and journals. His latest book, Geospatial Technology and the Role of Location in Science, is about bringing together the expertise of leading GIS scientists. The book traces the adoption and dissemination of geospatial technology in a range of disciplines. It examines the impact this technology has had, and is likely to have, on the study of spatial behavior, phenomena, and processes. Other publications include Modelling Land-Use Change: Progress and Applications, Contemporary Research in Population Geography: A Comparison of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, Geographical Information Systems for Urban and Regional Planning, Land Use Simulation for Europe, Application of GIS in Urban and Regional Planning, The Added Value of Geographical Information Systems in Public and Environmental Health, and Spatial Analytical Perspectives on GIS.

Comments Scholten, "GIS is making a difference. It's a kind of new paradigm in a lot of sciences, not just geography. It's also health, it's demography, it's even history, it's social sciences. It's unbelievable how many sciences can use space and location as an entrance to improving their work."

ESRI

Geo: International