Biography:  A. Stewart Fotheringham is Science Foundation Ireland Research Professor and Director of the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG) at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth. He previously held positions at the University of Newcastle in the UK, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Florida and Indiana University. He obtained his PhD and MA at McMaster University in Canada and his BSc at Aberdeen University in Scotland. He has been actively involved with large GIS-based initiatives in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland.

Professor Fotheringham's research interests include: the integration of spatial analysis and GIS; spatial statistics; exploratory spatial data analysis; and spatial modelling. His expertise is in the analysis of spatial data and in particular the local modelling of spatial relationships with geographically weighted regression, for which he has co-authored software that has been distributed to a wide variety of agencies and individuals concerned with spatial modelling. He is a founding editor of Transactions in GIS and is on a number of editorial boards. He has co-authored eight books, including Quantitative Geography: Perspectives on Spatial Data Analysis and Geographically Weighted Regression: An Analysis of Spatially Varying Relationships. He has also published over 35 book chapters and over 100 journal articles. He is a co-editor of the recently published 600+ page Handbook of Geographical Information Science published by Blackwell.

Professor Fotheringham has presented many keynote addresses at International Conferences and he has organised workshops on Geographically Weighted Regression in many countries Professor Fotheringham is a recipient of a $2.75 million award from Science Foundation Ireland and has held many other grants totalling in excess of $14 million. In addition he is the PI and Director of a $10 million grant which funds a Strategic Research Cluster in Advanced Geotechnologies, a consortium of university, industry and government agency partners.