The Department of Geography and Planning congratulates Dr. Dongmei Chen on being awarded the Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG) Award for Scholarly Distinction in Geography.
This award recognizes Dr. Chen’s outstanding internationally recognized research contributions and excellence in teaching and graduate student supervision throughout her career.
Professor Chen’s research is focused on the understanding and modeling of interactions between human activities and the physical environment by using GIS and remote sensing techniques and spatial modeling approaches from local to regional scales. Over her career, Dr. Chen has been a PI or Co-Applicant of research projects that were awarded more than $12 million dollars in total funding, from sources including NSERC, CIHR, provincial and federal government departments, and international funding agencies. She has supervised and/or co-supervised 29 BSc, 20 MSc, and 16 PhD students on research projects, and her students have gone on to secure high-level positions in government departments (e.g. in Health, Environment, Natural Resources) from municipal to federal levels in Canada, and in the private sector across the globe. Furthermore, a total of six of her PhD students have gone on to secure faculty positions in university departments in Canada, the US and China. Professor Chen’s scholarly contributions span several spheres, having published in excess of 100 peer reviewed journal articles in top tier journals, three books, 21 book chapters, well over 150 conference presentations, and contributed to the development of four different GIS software packages. Several peer reviewed articles have earned her recognitions, including a chief editor recommendation and a most cited paper in the prestigious ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and an editor’s choice award from the journal Land. Further evidence of the remarkable significance and impact of her research is reflected in her popularity as a sought-after speaker — with more than 30 invited talks for national and international colloquia and seminars — as well as her recognition through international research awards: the Shangdong Soft Science Excellence Award (China), the Wan Kuancheng research award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and John I. Davidson President’s Award from the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
For more information on the Canadian Assocation of Geographers awards, please visit their website.