Armstrong, Marc (1952–)

Marc P. Armstrong is a geographer who specializes in geographic information science (GIScience) and has done pioneering work in computational geography.

Armstrong earned degrees in geography from the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh (baccalaureate), the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (master's), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (doctorate). He has been a faculty member at the University of Iowa since 1984, rising to the rank of professor in 1998. He has held several academic leadership positions at the university, including continuous service as departmental executive officer of the department of geography since 2000 as well as other appointments, such as administrative fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2006–2009, interim dean for research in the college in 2006, and interim director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, 2007–2009.

Dr. Armstrong's research is in the interdisciplinary area of GIScience. He has published more than 100 academic papers and is also coauthor or coeditor of several monographs. He has served as North American Editor of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science, and he now serves as an editorial board member of several journals in the broad area of GIScience.

Dr. Armstrong is known as a pioneer in computational geography, specifically for his contributions to the development of parallel processing methods for geographic problem solving. His approaches span novel problem representations, new methods and algorithms, benchmark evaluations of solution qualities, and a variety of geographic applications. For example, with his collaborators, Armstrong has developed a variety of evolutionary programming approaches to multicriteria spatial decision-making problems that often require evaluation by various stakeholders. Other recent work has investigated how geographic information technologies may be used to compromise personal privacy and how mobile geographic information technologies can improve geographic education.