GIScience 2010 is delighted to announce that Professor Lynn S. Liben and Professor Kai Nagel as keynote speakers to this year's conference.
Lynn S. Liben is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A. where she also holds faculty appointments in College of Health & Human Development and in the College of Education. A major focus of Dr. Liben's research is on spatial cognition, its development, and on how individual differences in spatial cognition are relevant for science education. Illustrative is research examining children's and adults' success in identifying locations and directions on maps, and adults' success in mapping geological data. She has used her research to help design educational programs for television, museums, and classrooms A second focus of Dr. Liben's work is on the development of gender and racial stereotypes and how these affect educational and occupational choices. Her work at the intersection of space and gender includes the study of sex-related differences in spatial skills and of the gender gap in performance on the National Geographic Bee. Since receiving her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan, she has authored or co-authored over 125 articles and 10 books or monographs.
After studying physics and meteorology in Cologne and Paris, Kai Nagel was awarded his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Cologne on "Fast microscopic traffic simulations". From 1995 to 1999 he was at Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the "TRANSIMS" team. From 1999-2004 he was assistant professor for Computer Science at ETH Zurich at the Institute for Scientific Computing. Since 2004 he is full professor for "Transport systems planning and transport telematics" at the Technical University of Berlin. His research interests include: large transportation simulations, modeling and simulation of socio-economic systems, multi-agent simulations.