RICHARDSON, Texas (Jan. 10, 2005) — Dr. Fang Qiu, an assistant professor of geographic information sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), has been awarded a $70,000 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to help create a system that will track scientific information about the Earth for use in higher education.
The grant was funded under NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) Higher Education Alliance, and Qiu will serve as co-investigator of the initiative, alongside researchers from George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., the City University of New York and Northern Illinois University.
For the project, Qiu and the other scientists will develop a Web-based information system called “GeoBrain.” The system will make NASA’s EOS information easily accessible to users in the higher education community and allow them to develop interoperable, Web-executable geospatial service modules and models for extracting customized data and information. It will have the capability to deliver a data-enhanced geospatial learning and research environment to the desktops of students and professors.
The project is part of the Earth Observing System’s Earth Science Research, Education and Applications Solutions Network program, which was established to create a distributed network of data and information providers for Earth science research, applications and education.
NASA’s EOS is made up of a series of satellites, a science component and a data system that supports a coordinated series of polar-orbiting and low-inclination satellites for long-term global observations of the land surface, biosphere, solid Earth, atmosphere and oceans.
Qiu teaches graduate courses in geographic information science and remote sensing in UTD’s School of Social Sciences. He has conducted numerous government-sponsored projects at the National Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information Systems of China, as well as for NASA’s Affiliated Research Center. Qiu has served as a reviewer for numerous academic journals and book publishers.
Qiu received his Bachelor of Science degree from the East China Normal University, his Master of Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina.
About UTD
The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the convergence of Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart of the complex of major multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor®, enrolls more than 14,000 students. The school’s freshman class traditionally stands at the forefront of Texas state universities in terms of average SAT scores. The university offers a broad assortment of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs. For additional information about UTD, please visit the university’s web site at www.utdallas.edu.