Biographies of Presenters

Jack Dangermond is Founder and President of Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI), headquartered in Redlands, California, USA .Founded in 1969, ESRI is the leading geographic information systems (GIS) company in the world, providing software like ArcInfo, ArcView GIS, and ArcExplorer to clients in 90 countries. Over the last thirty years, Jack has delivered keynote addresses at numerous international conferences, published hundreds of papers on GIS, and given thousands of presentations on GIS throughout the world. He is the recipient of a number of medals, awards, lectureships, and honorary degrees, including the 2000 LaGasse Medal of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Brock Gold Medal of the International Society for Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing, the Cullum Geographical Medal of the American Geographical Society, the EDUCAUSE Medal of EduCause, the Horwood Award of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, the Anderson Medal of the Association of American Geographers, and the John Wesley Powell Award of the U.S. Geological Survey. He is a member of many professional organizations and has served on advisory committees for such U.S.agencies as NASA, EPA, NIMA, the National Academy of Sciences, and NCGIA. Jack was educated at California Polytechnic College-Pomona, the University of Minnesota, Harvard University's Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Design. Mr. Dangermond holds two honorary doctorate degrees from Ferris State University and the University of Redlands, respectively. Jack also presides over the annual ESRI (GIS) User Conference in San Diego with attendance this year approaching 10,000 people from around the world.

Carol R. Scheman has been Vice President for Government, Community, and Public Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania since September 1994. During the course of her tenure in this position, she has developed, coordinated, and implemented the University's activities and responses to public policy issues at the federal, state, and local levels of government. In addition, Ms. Scheman works closely with community leaders to enhance Penn's relationship with its neighbors.

Prior to coming to the University of Pennsylvania , Ms. Scheman was Deputy Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. She also served as Director of Federal Relations at the Association of American Universities (AAU) for thirteen years and then became Vice President in 1991. Prior to working at the AAU, she has worked as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill. She has a BA degree from Boston University and a MSSA from Case Western Reserve University

Susan M. Wachter is Professor of Real Estate and Finance at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania , and Director of the Wharton GIS Lab. Dr. Wachter served as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, from 1998 to 2001. As Assistant Secretary, Dr. Wachter was principal advisor to the Secretary of HUD on national housing and urban policy. Dr. Wachter served as President of the American Real Estate Urban Economics Association from 1988 to 1989. The author of over 100 publications and 10 volumes, Dr. Wachter was Chairperson of the Wharton Real Estate Department from 1996 to 1998. Formerly co-editor of Real Estate Economics, Dr. Wachter serves on multiple editorial boards and is a Faculty Fellow of The Homer Hoyt Institute for Advanced Real Estate Studies and Academic Fellow at the Urban Land Institute.

Eric Orts is Professor of Legal Studies and Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania . His primary research and teaching interests are in corporate governance and environmental management. His scholarly work is widely published in academic journals (mostly law reviews) and books. Some recent writings include War and the Business Corporation, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, 2002 and The Ethical and Environmental Limits of Stakeholder Theory (with Alan Strudler), Business Ethics Quarterly, 2002. Prior to joining Wharton's faculty in 1991, Orts practiced law at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City and was Chemical Bank fellow in corporate social responsibility at Columbia University School of Law. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, UCLA School of Law, the University of Michigan Law School, the University of Leuven in Belgium , and Tsinghua University in China . In 2002-2003, he will be the Eugene P. Beard Faculty Fellow at Harvard University ’s Center for Ethics and the Professions. He will also be a faculty fellow in the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School . In January 2003, he will be a visiting professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California , Santa Barbara .

Dr. Warner Phelps has a Ph.D. in toxicology from the University of Tennessee and is certified by the American Board of Toxicology. Since the early '80's he has worked in the agricultural industry, most recently having worked for three companies without having changed jobs. Currently, he is working for Syngenta.

Warner is the manager in environmental safety specializing in environmental exposure assessment. He has both modeling and GIS personnel working in his group. The group uses the two to predict and subsequently limit environmental exposures to company products. The group also assists the company with other GIS projects designed to help focus business issues. He just edited a book this year entitled Pesticide Environmental Fate and he is liable to talk about it if even the least bit encouraged.

Hal Reid has spent over 20 years in Fast Food development, including Burger King, KFC, Popeyes, Arby’s and currently Allied Domecq (which is, Dunkin Donuts, Baskin Robbins and Togos ).

His entry into business GIS began at Arby’s where he and his team implemented the first GIS in fast food that actually worked. Primary applications, at that time included the mapping of franchise territories as well as the usual thematics and demographics used for new store development.

After the Arby’s experience, he spent 5 years with Intergraph trying to create the ultimate Business GIS, without great success. He is now working on a project with Allied Domecq to integrate the systems for development targeting, tracking and visualization to be rolled out this December.

Dr. Alan R. Stevens is the FGDC’s the International Program Manager and principal operating officer for Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Secretariat. The GSDI provides policy, technical development, and capacity building support as well as conference facilitation, web-site services, software, etc to encourage Spatial Data Infrastructure development worldwide.

Alan received his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1972, from the University of Wisconsin . As a commissioned officer he taught structural design to newly commissioned and career officers in the Army Corps of Engineers. He was managed all photogrammetry and remote sensing production and research within the Tennessee Valley Authority until ‘78 when he joined the US Geological Survey. Since then he has held many responsible positions including direction of the International Activities for the National Mapping Program.

Al is the Past President and currently a Fellow in the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS). He received the Meritorious Service and Points of Light Awards from the Department of the Interior, the Claude F. Birdsey Key from the ASPRS, the Kodak Information Technology Award, an Outstanding Young Man in Chattanooga Award, the Army Accommodation Medal, and is a member of the Chi Epsilon Honor Engineering Fraternity and the Order of the Engineer. He and his wife, Dr Karen Stevens, volunteer to assist families of chemically dependant adolescents.

Mr. Thompson has been in the credit union data processing business both as a customer and vendor for 30 years. He served as SVP of Operations for the Texas Credit Union League and Affiliates data processing service bureau for ten years. He then served ten years as SVP/CIO of the Members Insurance Group, which specialized in insurance products for both credit unions and their members. He has served for the past ten years as SVP/CIO for Credit Union of Texas, which is the largest cu in Texas at $1.3 billion in assets and 165,000 members. Mr. Thompson has been designing, implementing, and managing leading edge computer systems and solutions in the credit union industry for most of his 30-year career. He has received numerous industry awards and been recognized in many national trade publications for his innovative and visionary solutions.

Mr. Wally began work as a Geophysicist for an international seismic contracting company, and spent the early years of his career overseas. He worked 2 years in Libya where he learned how to program the then-new IBM 360 computer. He then spent 10 years based in London, developing and deploying geophysical processing and mapping systems in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

In 1975, he joined Gulf Oil Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a Research Geophysicist. In 1985 after Chevron acquired Gulf, he moved to the Advanced Systems Section at Chevron Oil Field Research, La Habra, California. In 1992, he transferred to Chevron’s Houston offices as Senior Staff Research Scientist.

For more than 20 years Mr. Wally’s primary focus has been design, development and implementation of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and database technology to improve the efficiency and safety of Gulf, Chevron, and then ChevronTexaco’s operations worldwide. He was also Chairman of the ESRI Petroleum User Group (PUG); a special interest group representing most major energy and service companies, from 1997 to 2002.

Dr. Rubin received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and his M.D. from Columbia University in 1976. Dr. Rubin joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and became Professor of Medicine in 1998. Dr. Rubin holds secondary appointments as Professor in the Department of Microbiology, School of Medicine and as Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He won the Donald B Martin, M.D. Teaching Service Award in 1996. Dr. Rubin’s work in the lab is focused in three areas: elucidating the genetic and metabolic regulatory networks that allow tuberculosis to persist in the human host for years, determination of the molecular basis of serine protease inhibition and mathematical modeling of complex biomolecular systems. He is principal investigator on two NIH RO1 grants, two NSF grants and a DARPA grant. He has served on study sections and review panels for the NIH, NSF, WHO, The Medical Research Council of South Africa, NASA and the Naval Medical R&D Command.

Bruce Cahan graduated Wharton in 1976, and Temple Law School in 1979. After a successful 10 years working on corporate, public and real estate finance transactions at Weil Gotshal and Manges, he founded a nonprofit Urban Logic to address the institutional and financial obstacles cities face in adopting, using and sustaining new technologies. His pioneering research for the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) into finance options for spatial data infrastructure (SDI) led to the OMB I-Team Initiative. He has served as Chair of Financing Solutions for the Initiative and one of its chief architects. As a participant in New York City 's mapping response to 9/11, he saw first-hand the value of collaborations and partnerships to support emergency response, homeland security, e-government and improved citizen-centric service delivery. Bruce will share his ideas for national approaches to organizing and financing GIS for Homeland Security.

Dr. Kearns is a professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania and he is also the co-director (with Linguistics professor Mark Liberman) of Penn's interdisciplinary Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. In addition, he is a Senior Technology Advisor to Riverhead Networks. Riverhead provides advanced technology for defense against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, as well as against other modern network security threats. Dr. Kearns received a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University in 1989. Following postdoctoral positions at the Laboratory for Computer Science at M.I.T. and at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, in 1991 he joined the research staff of AT&T Bell Labs. Dr. Kearns spent the decade 1991-2001 in basic AI and machine learning research at AT&T Labs (formerly AT&T Bell Labs, prior to the AT&T-Lucent split). During his last four years there, he was the head of the AI department, where he led a broad range of system and foundational AI work. During his time AT&T/Bell Labs, he also served as the head of the Machine Learning department, and as the head of the Secure Systems Research department. Dr. Kearns' primary research interests are in artificial intelligence and machine learning, including computational learning theory, reinforcement learning, probabilistic inference and graphical models, and computational game theory. He has worked on a variety of applications of AI to human-computer interaction, including spoken dialogue systems and software agents in MUDs. He also has interests in cryptography and network security, and theoretical computer science.

Robert Marx

Robert W. Marx (or "Bob" as he is better known to most in the profession) is Chief of the Geography Division at the U.S. Census Bureau. In this role since 1983, except for a three-year period during which he directed early planning for Census 2000, he has been responsible for directing the planning and implementation of all geographic activities required to support the Census Bureau’s data collection, data processing, data tabulation, and data dissemination programs for the United States, including Puerto Rico and the other Island Areas under U.S. jurisdiction.

Major activities include ensuring that the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) data base contains all currently know streets and roads, their names, the range of addresses along each section of each road having city-style addresses, current legal boundaries for each of the more than 39,000 units of local and tribal government, and boundaries for all other geographic entities used for Census 2000 data tabulation, such as census tracts, traffic analysis zones, school districts, urbanized areas, urban clusters, voting districts, and state legislative districts. Other major activities include development of the Census 2000 address list (known as the Master Address File or MAF) that contains the address and ZIP Code for each of the nearly 120 million housing units in the United States, each of which is linked to its census block location in the TIGER database. These activities have involved the Census Bureau in extensive partnership activities with state, local, and tribal governments across the United States as well as in Puerto Rico and the Island Areas.

Mr. Marx received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Geography from the University of Minnesota in 1965, where he pursued graduate studies in geography and urban planning. During his more than 36-year career at the Census Bureau, he has received several awards for exceptional performance, including the Department of Commerce’s Gold and Silver Medals, and the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award.

Barbara J. Ryan is the Associate Director for Geography at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). In this capacity, she has program and policy oversight responsibilities for the Nation’s largest civilian mapping organization. During her 27-year career with the USGS, she has worked in seven States and Washington, D.C. From 1989 to 1991, she served as Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science at the Department of the Interior. Before becoming Associate Director for Geography, she served as the agency’s Chief Information Officer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geology from the State University of New York at Cortland, a Master’s degree in Geography from the University of Denver, and a Master’s degree in Civil Engineering from Stanford University. She resides, with her husband and son, in Oakton, Virginia .

Felix Oberholzer-Gee is the Class of 1965 Wharton Term Assistant Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Zurich. His research interests include the interaction between business and (local) governments, issues of political economy and environmental economics. He has written about strategies for siting industrial facilities, local restrictions of business activities, and the impact of information regulation on property values.

Joseph Ferreira is Professor of Urban Planning and Operations Research and Head of the Planning Support Systems Group in MIT's Urban Studies and Planning Department. His undergrad degree and PhD are from MIT (in electrical engineering and operations research). Prof. Ferreira teaches analytical methods and computer-based modeling for planning and urban management and his research and publications involve interactive spatial analysis tools and geographic information systems for land use planning, urban modeling, and risk management. He was the founding Director of the MIT Planning Department's Computer Resource Lab. Prof. Ferreira has been active in a number of professional organizations concerned with GIS and urban planning uses of computing. Recently, he was President of URISA, the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association – an interdisciplinary professional organization that is especially concerned with the management of spatial information. He is also a principal investigator of several recent research projects involving GIS interoperability, urban modeling, the development of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), and the inclusion of land use patterns in air pollution models.

Tom Kingsley is a senior researcher and research manager in housing, urban policy, and governance issues at the Urban Institute. He directs the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership--an initiative to further the development of advanced data systems for policy analysis and community building in U.S. cities. He also is leading efforts to use 2000 Census data to analyze neighborhood change across cities. Mr. Kingsley served as the Director of the Urban Institute's Center for Public Finance and Housing from 1986 through 1997. In the 1990s, Mr. Kingsley was co-director of the Ford Foundation sponsored Urban Opportunity Program, which produced four books on the status of urban policy issues in America and worked with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros on a series of essays on the future of U.S. cities. He has also directed several other major policy research programs for HUD, the Cleveland Foundation, the United Nations, and the Czech and Slovak Republics . Mr. Kingsley previously served as Director of the Rand Corporation's Housing and Urban Policy Program, and as Assistant Administrator for the New York City Housing and Development Administration. He has also taught on the faculties of the graduate urban planning programs at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California .

Andrew Reamer, Ph.D., is Principal of Andrew Reamer & Associates, a Boston-based economic development consulting firm. In recent years, Dr. Reamer has aided a number of national organizations in creating data tools for local practitioners and policy analysts. For the Economic Development Administration (EDA), he co-authored Socioeconomic Data for Understanding Your Regional Economy: A User's Guide, and Socioeconomic Data for Economic Development: An Assessment. He is co-creator of EconData.Net (www.econdata.net), an EDA-funded guide to regional economic data on the Web. For the Ford Foundation and the University of Florida , Dr. Reamer is helping create a nationwide network of researchers and practitioners interested in the use of multi-source community statistical systems for community development. For the Employment and Training Administration and the Ford Foundation, he is assisting in the development of WorkforceUSA, a data and information web site for workforce development practitioners. For the Annie E. Casey Foundation, he is co-developing a state index on working poor families. Dr. Reamer received a Ph.D. in Economic Development and Public Policy and a Masters in City Planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cynthia Taeuber has been a demographer at the Census Bureau since 1974 and has written extensively on the older population and women in the American economy. Since 1996, she has worked on the needs of data users during the early development of the American Community Survey. As part of that, she has explored uses of the annually updated statistics that go beyond the traditional uses of decennial statistics. She has particularly been interested in development of Community Statistical Systems -- that is, systems that use multiple data sets, including the decennial Census and the American Community Survey profiles in conjunction with local administrative records, in statistical models to improve estimates and projections and to better inform "what if" policy questions.