Daniel Sui, Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Geography and director, Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA), has been appointed chair of the Department of Geography, for a four-year term, effective July 1, 2011, pending approval by the Ohio State Board of Trustees.

A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Sui is a widely respected scholar in many aspects of technology, spatial sciences, urban, and regional research. He joined CURA as its director and the Department of Geography in 2009. Prior to coming to Ohio State, Sui held the Reta A. Haynes Endowed Chair in Geosciences and served as assistant vice president for research and director for geospatial information science and technology (GIST) at Texas A & M.

Sui's research interests include the integration of spatial analysis and modeling with GIS for socio-economic and environmental applications, theoretical issues in geographic information science (GIScience), GIS in public health, urban geography, information ecology, and emerging geographies of the information society. He is currently working on legal and ethical issues of using geospatial technologies to track people, animals, and commodities. Sui is a Co-PI on a NSF-funded project on geographic knowledge production using volunteered geographic information. Sui serves as the editor-in-chief for GeoJournal and a contributing editor of GeoWorld. Sui is also a current member of the U.S. National Mapping Science Committee.