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January 17, 2007
The advent of 2007 brought some fresh faces to the Penn State Geography Department: Alex Klippel and Frank Hardisty. Alex joins the department as an Assistant Professor, specializing in spatial cognition and GIScience. He and his wife recently relocated from the University of Melbourne. Frank will be assisting GeoVISTA as a research associate. After receiving his Ph.D. from the PSU Geography Department, Frank worked at the University of South Carolina teaching and researching geographic visualization. Welcome Alex and welcome (back) Frank to the department!
I greatly looked forward to coming to the Geogrpahy Deartment/GeoVISTA Center at Penn State. I will continue working on multidisciplinary topics at the interface between spatial cognition and GIScience. Especially the area of geographic event conceptualization and the integration of cognitive factors into formal characterizations of dynamic spatial processes are at the center of my current work. In this respect, I will be setting up a Human-Computer-Interaction lab with various possibilities to investigate basic research questions as well as testing the usability of different interfaces. One of the problems that will be addressed is the question of how underspecified conceptual structures can be communicated in different modalities such as language and graphics. A second line of research will be the interaction of people, environments, and mobile and static devices, so called location based services (LBS). Here I am interested in wayfinding and navigation processes and the conceptualization of spatial structures while a cognitive agent is immersed in an environment.
I am pleased to return to the Penn State Geography department after I received my PhD at Penn State in 2003, under the direction of Alan MacEachren. I then taught and researched geographic visualization at the University of South Carolina from then until now.
I will be in the dual role of research faculty in the GeoVISTA Center, and as an instructor in the Dutton e-Education Institute. My research work at the GeoVISTA Center will focus on developing software to enable exploration of phenomena represented by multivariate, geographically-referenced data. I will be teaching online classes on programming GIS and geographical information analysis.
My family in State College includes my wife, HyangJa, and daughters Hannah, age 5, and Lena, age 2. We are all eagerly awaiting the birth of a boy, provisionally nicknamed "Boom-Boom", around February 24.