He received his Ph.D. in Geography from UCSB in 1990. His research interests lie in the emerging field of environmental informatics, a synthesis of computer, information, and Earth sciences. He has published in remote sensing, image processing, software architecture, massive distributed data systems, and digital libraries. His current research is focused on geospatial information curation and provenance, novel methods of whole-Earth visualization, and the use of next-generation database management systems to organize and process petabytes of geospatial information.