Jack Dangermond Award

2015's winner was Patrick Rickles, a PhD student at UCL. His main focus is to develop bespoke GIS tools for the researchers to facilitate interdisciplinary understandings and community engagement. Patrick’s submission focused on how people learnt GIS. Specifically, did contextual learning improve knowledge retention?

In 2016 the UK’s Jack Dangermond Early Career Scholar winner was Katie Hall from The University of Cambridge. The judges were impressed with the way that Katie had used GIS to engage school pupils in learning, making it fun and interactive. Katie is actively involved in integrating GIS in education and you can see her winning StoryMap here.

The 2017 winner was Damien Mansell a lecturer from the University of Exeter. Damien used ArcGIS Online in his geomorphology course to engage students. Students would use mobile apps to collect data and ArcGIS Online to analyse and report their findings. Damien then extended this to engage with learners around the world by integrating ArcGIS Online into a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).

In 2018 Jess Hepburn from Newcastle University won with her study of how best to geovisalise Environmental Impact Assessments.  This study was based on her undergraduate dissertation and covered the collection, analysis and presentation of environmental data to support impact studies around new developments such as wind-farms. The aim was to make a web app which allowed non-expert users to analyse site suitability using web GIS without having to be expert GIS users.

In 2019 we broke with tradition and awarded the prize to a team. Jo Wilkin and Katie Rawlings, University of Southampton, developed and delivered a short course in Python coding within the ArcGIS Platform. This was a response to their realisation that python scripting skills were vital to their PhD research but seemed to be lacking from the Universities undergraduate geography course. Their course was 200% over subscribed and a huge success.

The 2020 winner was Richard Burke from the University of Leeds.  Richard had used ArcGIS to develop a flood risk decision support tool.  The tool would map and assess flooding and then combine the flood outline with socio-economic data, critical infrastructure and land use data to calculate the risk across the catchment.  The results were presented to users and decision makers in a web map application which was clear and easy to use. Richard is now pursuing a PhD at the University of Newcastle.

The 2021 Jack Dangermond Young Scholar was Victoria Song from The University of Edinburgh.

The 2022 Jack Dangermond Young Scholar was Emma Underwood from Kingston University London.
 

What does the future hold for Biodiversity Hotspots?
Systematic mapping of patterns, clusters & knowledge gaps for ecological range shift in plants

The 2023 Jack Dangermond Young Scholar was Vincent Nguyen from University College London.
 

Virus Watch: Epidemiology meets GeoInformatics
Using GPS tracking technology to understand movement during the COVID-19 pandemic and how this can impact spread of SARs‑CoV‑2