Taylor Anderson Awarded the SFU Governor General’s Gold Medal

Congratulations to Dr. Taylor Anderson on being a 2020 recipient of the SFU Governor General’s Gold Medal that recognizes exceptional academic standing at the graduate level. Dr. Anderson joined the Spatial Analysis and Modeling Lab research group in the Department of Geography in 2013 to pursue a MSc degree and then continued with a PhD in 2015.

Her research contributes to the field of Geographic Information Science (GISc) by developing a suite of novel network-based geospatial modeling approaches to represent a range of environmental and social systems. She also developed a network-based approach for testing and validating these types of models. Dr. Anderson implemented the developed modelling approaches to simulate the spread of invasive insect spread across landscape networks and of disease propagation across human contact networks. Her research provides useful tools for forecasting and scenario-testing to enhance decision-making processes for urban and natural resources management.

During her graduate studies Dr. Anderson published extensively and was a recipient of the NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship in support of her MSc research and the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship in support of her PhD research. She was an active member of the Geography Department, SFU’s Esri Canada Center of Excellence (ECCE) in GIS, and the Geography Graduate Student Association. She also obtained several awards including the best conference paper award at the ACM SIGSpatial 2018 and the 2020 William L. Garrison Award for Best Dissertation in Computational Geography. Dr. Anderson’s enthusiasm for teaching, research, and innovation as well as academic excellence has led to a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at the Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University in Virginia, USA. The SFU Governor General’s Gold Medal will be awarded on June 11^th at Virtual Spring 2020 Convocation Celebration. Congratulations to Taylor!