Josef Strobl - Biography#

Prof Josef Strobl is Professor at the University of Salzburg, having founded, developed and led its Department of Geoinformatics until 2022. He holds degrees in Geography from Vienna University and has been teaching Geographic Information Science and related subjects at universities worldwide. He is a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and had founded and directed its institute for Geographic Information Science and later its eponymous commission. As a founding director of the iSPACE Research Studio he has established aca-demic research beyond university environments.

Josef Strobl is serving as a board or council member for international academic organizations in the geospatial domain (including UN GGIM Academic Network, HeiGIT, ISDE, WGIC and GISIG), as a reviewer and advisor for ERC and national research bodies, and on the editorial boards of leading journals in Geoinformatics and GIScience. Beyond that he is promoting and spearheading various educational, organizational and research initiatives.

With a specific emphasis on the European dimension of spatial information sciences Josef Strobl contributed to the early GISDATA (ESF) programme, engaged with the European Spa-tial Data Infrastructure initiative, and today serves as an active board member of EUROGI (European Umbrella Organisation for Geographic Information) as well as a frequent contribu-tor to EuroGeo as a professional organization with a strong educational orientation.

The latter has been the major focus of Prof. Strobl’s career: instrumental in developing and implementing the worldwide UNIGIS postgraduate distance learning programme (with 5000+ alumni worldwide), leading several curriculum development and graduate capacity building ini-tiatives beyond Europe, initiating major GIS Day events and the iDEAS:lab outreach facility at the Science City Salzburg – the impact of all these has been recognized with the appointment as national (Austrian) Erasmus+ ambassador for higher education.

Having founded the annual AGIT and GI_Forum symposia in Salzburg decades ago and the GIS-in-Central-Asia conference series in 2005, communicating the progress, practice and perspectives of geospatial technologies and methods is at the core of Josef Strobl’s agenda.