The 2010 MacArthur Fellows have been announced, and these “genius grant” recipients include a few that are using geospatial tools and data in new ways to explore and discover new insights about our world.
Kelly Benoit-Bird is a marine biologist at Oregon State University who is using new sonar technologies to map and explore the invisible behavior of ocean creatures, understanding where animals are and how their behavior is effected by their environment. She discusses visualizing in 3D over time to see the behavior of individuals and how that relates to what its predators and prey were doing. The overall goal of her research is to understand the food web in the ocean.
Carlos D. Bustamante is a population geneticist at Stanford University who is mining DNA data to address questions of evolution, origin, and patterns of population migration. He addresses issues of race, and the fact that there is a continuum of human genetic variation that occurs across a broad geographic range.
View short videos from each in the links provided for each above.
