Bios of Speakers

Dr. Mark D. Schwartz is a Professor of Geography at UW-Milwaukee.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1985. He is serving as Chair of the University Committee this year (Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate) and was Chair of the Geography Department for the previous seven years.  Prof. Schwartz is a synoptic climatologist, and his main research interest is plant-climate interactions during the onset of spring.  He has received several National Science Foundation grants, authored over forty publications, and recently edited a book entitled “Phenology:  An Integrative Environmental Science.” Phenology is the study of plant and animal life cycle events, which are triggered by environmental changes, especially temperature. Wide ranges of phenomena are included, from first openings of leaf and flower buds, to insect hatchings and return of birds. Each one gives a ready measure of the environment as viewed by the associated organism. Thus, phenological events are ideal indicators of the impact of local and global changes in weather and climate on the earth’s biosphere.

Dr. Steve Hu is an atmospheric scientist. He got his BS degree from Lanzhou University in China in 1982, and MS and PhD degrees from Colorado State University in 1986 and 1992, respectively. Over the years, he has worked on a wide variety of subjects in regional climate change, climate impacts on managed and unmanaged ecosystems, and theories of decision-making related to use of climate information. His specialties are in natural variability of the earth’s climate system, and he has published over 30 journal articles on interannual and multidecadal variations in regional and global precipitation, using diagnostic, statistical, and modeling methods. He is currently an associate professor at the School of Natural Resources and Department of Geosciences.

Dr. Brad Reed received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Kansas. After two years as an Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University Department of Earth Sciences, he took a position at the USGS National Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS). He was project leader for the IGBP global land cover mapping project and has worked on characterizing phenology from time-series satellite data for over 10 years. He is also the EROS representative to the MODIS Science Team.

Dr. Sherri K. Harms received her B.S. degree in computer science, mathematics and education from Buena Vista University (BVU), her M.S. degree in computer science from Iowa State University, and her Ph.D. degree in computer engineering and computer science from the University of Missouri-Columbia. In addition to several years of industry experience in software development and database management, she has been in academia for 14 years, and is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK). Her research area is temporal data mining with applications in drought risk management. She has a special interest in the integration of spatio-temporal data mining methods into geo-spatial decision support systems in the pursuit of making more informed, proactive decisions. She has 18 peer reviewed journal and conference publications, and her research has been funded by NSF, USDA, and state funding agencies. Over her career, Dr. Harms has been involved with over $2,000,000 in research grants and contracts as a PI or Co-PI. Dr. Harms is currently a co-PI for The University of Nebraska Strategic Research Cluster Grant: The High Plains Observatory for Integrated Phenology: Predicting The Behavior and Life Cycles of Introduced and Native Plants, Insects, and Plant Diseases on the Landscape.

Dr. Shashi Shekhar is a McKnight Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA. He was elected an IEEE fellow for contributions to spatial database storage methods, data mining, and geographic information systems (GIS). He is serving as a member of two committees of the National Research Council National Academy of Sciences, namely, the committee on mapping sciences and the committee to review the basic and applied research at National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency. He is also serving as a co-Editor-in-Chief of Geo-Informatica: An International Journal on Advances in Computer Sc. for GIS (ISSN 1384-6175); and a member of the steering committee of the ACM Intl. Conference on GIS. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of University Consortium on GIS (2003-2004), a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, a member of the IEEE-CS Computer Science & Engineering Practice Board, a program co-chair of the ACM Intl. Workshop on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (1996), and a technical advisor to United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), and other organizations. His research projects have been sponsored by the NSF, NASA, Army Research Laboratories, USDOT, FHWA, MN/DoT etc. He has co-authored a textbook on Spatial Databases (Prentice Hall, 2003, ISBN 0-13-017480-7) which has been translated into two foreign languages. He has published over 160 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, books, and conferences, and workshops. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California (Berkeley, CA). More details are available from http://www.cs.umn.edu/~shekhar.