Dr. Melinda Laituri received her PhD from the University of Arizona, Tucson in geography. Her dissertation research focused on environmental equity and groundwater resources in the American Southwest and the US-Mexico border. She holds a masters degree are in Hydrology and undergraduate degree in Geography . Dr. Laituri accepted a post doc at the University of Auckland, New Zealand where she then served as a lecturer in geography . She is a Fulbright Scholar and spent 2010 in Botswana working on indigenous knowledge and scientific innovation, and she conducted comparative research of major rivers as a Rachel Carson Fellow in Munich, Germany. Dr. Laituri is the Director of the Geospatial Centroid at CSU (gis.colostate.edu) that provides information and support for geographic information systems (GIS) activities, education, and outreach at CSU and in Colorado. She has worked with indigenous peoples throughout the world on issues related to natural resource management, disaster adaptation, and water resource issues using GIS that utilize cultural and eco-physical data in research models. A key focus is participatory GIS where indigenous peoples develop spatial information and maps essential for their management of their own resources. Dr. Laituri’s other research work focuses on the role of the Internet and geospatial technologies of disaster management and cross-cultural environmental histories of river basin management.