Werner Kuhn holds the Jack and Laura Dangermond Endowed Chair for Geographic Information Science and is a professor in the Department of Geography at UC Santa Barbara. He also directs the university's Center for Spatial Studies. His research and teaching are aimed at enabling transdisciplinary research through spatial information and computing. Before joining UC Santa Barbara in 2013, Werner was a professor of geoinformatics at the University of Münster, Germany, where he led MUSIL, an interdisciplinary semantic interoperability research lab (http://www.uni-muenster.de/Geoinformatics/en/musil/). He holds a doctorate from ETH Zurich in surveying engineering and was a post-doctoral researcher with the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (1989–1991) and with the Vienna University of Technology (1991–1996). He is a co-founder of the COSIT Conference Series (since 1993) and of the Vespucci Initiative since 2003.