Sui, Daniel (1965–)

One of contemporary geography's leading theoreticians of geographic information science (GIScience), among other topics, Daniel Z. Sui has played an important role in shaping the trajectory of the discipline.

After completing bachelor's and master's degrees in science at Peking University and earning a PhD from the University of Georgia in 1993, Sui taught for 16 years at Texas A&M University, where he held the Reta Haynes Endowed Chair in Geography as well as serving as assistant vice president for research and director of geospatial information science and technology (2004–2008). In 2009, he moved to the Ohio State University as Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis. He was a recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also held a variety of visiting fellowships and professorships. Starting in 2007, he served as editor-in-chief of GeoJournal and as a regular columnist for GeoWorld. His career has also been notable for his extensive publication record, including several books and monographs and countless journal articles, and for millions of dollars in external grant funding. He has also mentored numerous graduate students.

Sui's corpus of work lies largely in the domain of geographic information systems (GIS) theory and applications. His works address, for example, an exceptionally wide array of topics, including neogeography and the “wikification” of GIS, volunteered geographical information, digital cities, location-based services, small-world networks, fuzzy logic, neural networks, fractals, the use of geospatial technologies for surveillance (including geoslavery), the environmental impacts of digital technologies, ecological inference, and empirical applications of GIS to topics as diverse as homeland security, medical geography, binge drinking, traffic accidents, transportation modeling, natural disasters, food insecurity, property value appraisal, water management, floodplain mapping, urban obesity, landscape fragmentation, mental maps, urban modeling, urban heat islands, urban sprawl in Asia and the United States, voter turnout, Internet-based and GIS education, and Tobler's First Law. A consistent [Page 2722]theme throughout these works is the social uses and consequences of digital geospatial technologies, with a critical eye toward the costs as well as the benefits. Sui has also been instrumental in fostering a rapprochement between the GIS and critical human geography communities since the 1990s, when a productive and mutually transformative dialogue began to replace mutual recrimination. His work has become increasingly epistemologically self-conscious, and he helped pioneer the use of poststructuralist concerns such as the social origins and consequences of representations in the GIS literature.