Dan Jacobson joined the MGIS program within the Department of Geography in 2003. Dan completed B.Sc. (Hons.) degrees in Geography and Topographic Science in 1992 at the University of Wales, Swansea. During this period he worked as a land surveyor in London, and later as a GIS consultant in Aberystwyth, Wales. He began his Ph.D. fieldwork in Belfast Northern Ireland, and later at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB). While at UCSB he coordinated an interdisciplinary group of researchers from Departments of Geography, Computer Science, Psychology, Engineering and Music to investigate multi-sensory access to geo-spatial information. His Ph.D. was awarded in 2000 from Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, titled Geographies of Blindness: Learning, reading and communicating geographic space. In 1999 he was a U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research, Mary E. Switzer fellow. He was previously an Assistant Professor in the department of Geography at Florida State University.

Current Research:

Dan’s ongoing research is in developing multi-sensory access to GIS based systems to facilitate ease of access for novel users, for non-visual users and to extended opportunities for advanced users to collect, mine, validate and explore digital representations of geographic space.