Helena Mitasova awarded 2018 Waldo-Tobler GIScience Prize

The Austrian Academy of Sciences through its Commission for GIScience is awarding the GIScience Prize named after Prof Waldo Tobler to a scientist having demonstrated outstanding and sustained contributions to the discipline worthy of inspiring young scientists in Geoinformatics and Geographic Information Science, and having accomplished significant advances in research and education.

The received nominations were reviewed and assessed by an external panel of peers, who unanimously recommended to award the 2018 prize to Prof Helena Mitasova (North Carolina State University).

Congratulations to this recognition of innovation, leadership and excellence!

Prof Mitasova has made significant contributions to the methods and tools of Geographic Information Science over several decades documented by an excellent publication record. Geovisualisation, geostatistical and geospatial analyses, eg in the field of spatial interpolation and topographic methods today implemented in the GRASS open source environment are freely available for practitioners worldwide. She is an active member of the OSGeo Foundation, recognized by the 2010 Sol Katz award for exceptional Open source geospatial community service. 

Helena Mitasova is a graduate of the Slovak Technical University in Geodetic Cartography and serves as a professor at the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (MEAS), and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Geospatial Analytics, North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, NC. She has received numerous awards and actively contributes to the 'geospatial' community, as an editor, reviewer and most importantantly as a supervisor directing young scientists.

Prof Mitasova is an outstanding role model for next generation leaders in the geospatial sciences, and we are honoured to highlight her contributions in particular in the spirit of Open Science!