Duane F. Marble

    [Marble's picture]

    marble.1@osu.edu

    Address

    Department of Geography, The Ohio State University
    1036 Derby Hall, 154 North Oval Mall, Columbus, Oh 43210

    Current Positions

    • Professor Emeritus of Geography and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University
    • Faculty member, The Center for Mapping, The Ohio State University

    Education

    • Ph.D. (Geography), University of Washington, 1959
    • M.A. (Geography), University of Washington, 1956
    • B.A. (Geography), University of Washington, 1953

    Professional Activities

    After receiving his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington, Duane Marble served for nearly four years on the faculty of the Department of Regional Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Marble was promoted to Associate Professor, and later Professor, after accepting an appointment in the Department of Geography at Northwestern University. During the time he was at Northwestern, most of his research activity focused upon urban transportation-related spatial analysis problems. During his last seven years at that institution he served as Associate Director of The Transportation Center at Northwestern University. The Transpor tation Center at that time was an educational and research group whose base funding came from donations from various elements of the transport industry, research grants and contracts, and educational income from a series of short courses directed toward transportation industry executives. The Transportation Center also established and funded what has become one of the premier transportation research libraries in the United States.

    Upon moving to the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973, Dr. Marble established the Geographic Information Systems Laboratory - the first formal university research unit dealing with GIS - as well as the first formal graduate program in Geography providing a specialization in GIS. Over fifty graduate students completed this program and today many of these now hold senior positions in the GIS industry. While at SUNY at Buffalo, he also held an appointment in the Department of Computer Science.

    Upon becoming Chairman of the Commission on Geographical Data Sensing and Processing of the International Geographical Union in 1982, Dr. Marble established the International Symposia on Spatial Data Handling which quickly became the premier scientific meetings in the GIS area. Subsequently, Dr. Marble also served as Chair of the IGU Working Group on Global Space-Time Databases. Dr. Marble has also worked extensively with the introduction of GIS technology in Third World situations (e.g., Thailand, Malaysia, Chile and Costa Rica).

    In 1987 Dr. Marble joined the faculty of the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University to augment their existing programs in GIS. Since he joined the OSU faculty, the GIS special ization has produced six Ph.D. and 25 M.A. graduates. The instructional GIS program, OSU MAP-for-the-PC, that was created by Dr. Marble and his associates (Dr. Jay Sandhu and Ms. Sherry Amundson) was given a Best Software award by the Microcomputer Speciality Group of the Association of American Geographers in 1990. This teaching software in now in use by over three hundred universities; one-third of them outside of North America.

    In 1993 Dr. Marble received an Honors Award from the Association of American Geographers for:

    • seminal work in quantitative techniques, transportation
    • geography, computer modelling and simulation, and for
    • pioneering research in geographic information systems
    Dr. Marble has worked with The Nature Conservancy's Science and Latin America Programs in the development of a pilot geographic information system for Costa Rica that incorporated materials from the local Conservation Data Center. He has also worked closely with the Organization of Tropical Studies (a consortium of over fifty U.S. and Latin American universities) to design and implement a scientific GIS at the La Selva Biological Research Station in Costa Rica. La Selva is one of the world's most famous scientific centers for research on tropical rain forests. This latter work has been supported by substantial grants to OTS from the National Science Foundation, Environmental Systems Research Institute, and Sun Microsystems.

    Dr. Marble has served as a GIS consultant to a number of organizations in both the public and private sectors. These include the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Rand McNally, Environmental Systems Research Institute, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the Louisiana Department of Health, etc., as well as various units of the United Nations.

    Dr. Marble's current research work centers around three major areas:

    • The extension of spatial analysis approaches to include a stronger basis in spatial and temporal disaggregate data;
    • Linking scientific visualization and spatial exploratory data analysis to create tools for hypothesis generation in large, complex, space-time databases; and databases; and
    • Development of efficient, structured design methodologies for the implementation of geographic information systems.