Christopher Badurek obtained his PhD in September 2005. His
dissertation was titled “Measuring Change Similarity of
Spatial Entities: The Case of the Criminal History of
Place.” He is now a member of the faculty of the Appalachian
State University Department of Geography and Planning,
located in Boone North Carolina. He held a Research
Assistantship at the NCGIA for the NIMA funded research
project Immersive Information Spaces for Data Access and
Dissemination, under Dr. S. Fabrikant of the Department of
Geography at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
While an RA, he studied spatialization and information
visualization techniques, user interface design for
accessing information from large scale databases, assisted
in information system needs assessments at a federal agency,
and attended the NIMA University Research Initiative
Symposium. He was also an Assistant under his advisor Dr. D.
Flewelling for a Cadastral Geographic Information System
Consulting Project sponsored by the US Agency for
International Development (USAID) and UTJ, Guatemala City,
Guatemala in August 2001. He conducted needs analyses
through interviews with Guatemalan government employees,
site visits, database schema evaluation, and document
analysis. He also helped author the preliminary findings
report for the project.
Before arriving at the Department of Geography in 1999,
Chris completed a BA at Cornell University in Biology and
Psychology and a Master's degree from the School of
Informatics at the University at Buffalo. While at the
School of Informatics, he was awarded an NSF funded Research
Assistantship at the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake
Engineering and Research Information Service and an
University Service Excellence Award for contribution to the
University Libraries Website Usability Study. While in the
Geography Department, Chris has given over ten conference
presentations and was elected to Who's Who Among Students in
American Universities and Colleges in recognition of
outstanding merit and accomplishments as a graduate student
at the University at Buffalo.
He was also awarded a Dissertation Research Fellowship from
the University at Buffalo and a Travel Award from the
Northeast Chapter of the American Society for Information
Science and Technology for best student paper. He also
completed the Advanced Certificate in Educational Technology
from the Graduate School of Education and attended the NSF
sponsored Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS)
National Summer Workshop on Map Making and Visualization of
Spatial Data in the Social Sciences at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, in 2001. Chris was also a
selected Participant with Travel Award for the US-Japan
Workshop on Image Annotation, sponsored by the NCGIA. In
recognition of excellence in teaching for GIS courses taught
or co-taught while at UB, he was also awarded the Graduate
Student Excellence in Teaching Award from The Graduate
School this past spring.
His research interests in GI Science include qualitative
spatiotemporal reasoning, cognitive approaches to designing
spatial information systems, human computer interaction,
information visualization, and knowledge discovery in
spatial databases. Specific domain interests include crime
analysis methodologies, urban geography and cadastral GIS,
metadata standards, systems analysis, and digital libraries.
Dissertation research focuses upon integrating qualitative
spatiotemporal reasoning approaches with crime modeling
methods under the direction of Dr. Flewelling. He examined
these methods for analysis of crime data from Sao Paulo,
Brazil and the City of Buffalo with Dr. P. St. Jean of the
Department of Sociology.
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