George Christakos, Distinguished Professor of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, California USA. Dr. Christakos’ research focuses on space-time modelling and mapping of interdisciplinary systems, including medical geography, mathematical epidemiology, and health risk assessment. George was formerly a Professor at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. George Christakos has academic degrees from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (Diploma in Civil Engineering), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachussets (MS in Environmental Engineering), National Technical University of Athens, Greece (DSc in Metallurgical Engineering), and from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachussets (Ph.D. in Applied Sciences). From 1999 to 2005, he was the Director of the Center for the Integrated Study of the Environment at North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He also served as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at that institution from 2001 to 2005.
George has worked on several major interdisciplinary projects in the United States, China, Taiwan, Spain, Italy, England, Belgium, Greece, Russia, India, Bangladesh, and Egypt. Besides medical geography, he lists temporal GIS (TGIS), knowledge synthesis and data assimilation of natural systems, epidemiology of infectious diseases, modern geostatistics and spatio-temporal statistics, human exposure and health effects, hazard analysis and decision making among the tools in his resume.
Dr. Christakos is the author/co-author of seven books and over a hundred papers on various scientific subjects. His most recent books are: (with P Bogaert and ML Serre) Temporal GIS (Springer-Verlag, 2002); (with RA Olea, ML Serre, H-L Yu and L-L Wang) Interdisciplinary Public Health Reasoning and Epidemic Modelling: The Case of Black Death (Springer, 2005); and Epistematics: An Evolutionary Framework of Integrative Problem-Solving (Springer, 2009); and Integrative Problem-Solving in a Time of Decadence (Springer, 2010).
George’s laboratory has developed the SEKS-GUI software library, a science-based spatiotemporal data analysis and TGIS mapping software that is used worldwide. He is currently the Editor-In-Chief of the journal Stochastic Environmental Research Risk Assessment (an international journal by Springer). The best paper in Pedometrics award for the year 2005 has been awarded to: Savelieva, E., V. Demyanov, M. Kanevski, M. Serre, G. Christakos. ‘BME-based uncertainty assessment of the Chernobyl fallout’. Geoderma, 128 (2005): 312-324.
George may be contacted at gchrista@mail.sdsu.edu
Updated: January 2010:
Health and Medical Geography 