Geography Welcomes new Chair - Scott Freundschuh

Scott Freundschuh

Professor Scott Freundschuh joins the Department of Geography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque having just completed a two-year appointment as Program Director in Geography and Spatial Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF). While at NSF, Scott also served as Technical Coordinator for the NSF funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center.

Prior to his appointment at NSF Scott was Professor in the Geography Department at the University of Minnesota Duluth where he conducted research and taught courses in Geographic Information Sciences. His research interests are in the field of cognitive science, specifically spatial cognition as it relates to types of spatial knowledge and their structures, geographic scale, and spatial concept development and understanding.

His research has considered the role that sources of spatial information, such as maps and navigation play in cognition and learning, has explored the development of spatial concept understanding in small- and large-scale spaces, and it has tested the use of novel map representations to perform spatial tasks such as navigation and location tasks. His work is clearly interdisciplinary, involving research relevant to behavioral geography, cognitive psychology and GIScience in general.

Scott was the recent editor of the journal Cartographic Perspectives (CP) and will be the new managing editor of Cartography and Geographic Information Science (CaGIS) journal. He has co-edited a textbook on cognitive mapping, and has published chapters in various books and articles in professional journals in the field of Geographic Information Science.  [more]