I am a post-doctoral researcher at McGill University working with Reene Sieber on “Participatory Governance via the GeoWeb (i.e. geospatial web 2.0)” project.

I have a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,USA, a masters degree in Geographic Information Science from International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), the Netherlands, and a bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). My basic education is from Nepal, my home country. I am fortunate to attend these diverse schools, each of which has uniquely contributed to enrich my educational experience and broaden my worldviews.

After receiving the masters degree, I worked for five years in the design and implementation of computer-based information systems for managing land records in Nepal. During this period, I learnt that the development of useful information systems is far more challenging than it first appears. This experience eventually led me to the doctoral program in 2005.

My PhD dissertation work focused on user-generated geospatial information through the process of crowdsourcing  (also called Volunteered Geographic Information or GeoWiki). For this as well as other works, I draw extensively from information science. I, therefore, took two advisers for my dissertation: Chip Bruce from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science for the ‘informatics’ part and Zorica Nedovic-Budic from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning for the ‘geo’ part. Other members of my dissertation committee are: Lew Hopkins, Caroline Haythornthwaite, and Muki Haklay. Working with this amazing team of people from different intellectual backgrounds has been one of the most useful experiences of my graduate school life. It has provided me with an opportunity to learn multiple worldviews to prepare myself for dealing with multidisciplinary problems in the future.

Contact me at: namabudhathoki@gmail.com