Education

M.S. (1984); PhD (1988), University of Wisconsin-Madison

Biosketch

Dr. Kate Beard is a professor in the Department of Spatial Information Science Engineering at the University of Maine. She has been a research faculty with the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) since its beginning in 1989. She holds a M.S. (1984) and Ph.D. (1988) from the Institute for Environmental Studies, Land Resources Program, where she specialized in geographic information systems.

Research Interests

Dr. Beard’s current research interests include modeling, analysis and visualization of spatio-temporal phenomena. Among active research projects in which she serves as principle investigator include: an NSF grant working with oceanographers to develop an ontology of ocean related events, detect oceanographic events from multiple ocean observing sensors, and develop methods for exploration of event patterns; an NSF IGERT grant to develop a new PhD training program in Sensor Science, Engineering and Informatics; and an NSF grant to investigate the application of spatial concepts to genome mapping. Previously she has investigated several aspects of digital libraries from metadata support for information description and retrieval to visualization of metadata for efficient information browsing and quality evaluation. Current work on digital libraries addresses issues of metadata services, gazetteer development and the extension of the gazetteer concept to geographic knowledgebase. Dr. Beard has authored or co-authored over 50 articles in journals, books and proceedings in geographic information science.