Congratulations to the winners of the 2017 Esri Young Scholar competition

May 25, 2017

Krista Amolins

Almost thirty applications were received from students across Canada for this year’s Esri Young Scholar competition. Find out who won the award and a trip to the Esri User Conference in San Diego.

GIS is used in a wide range of disciplines, as illustrated by the research undertaken by this year’s applicants for the Esri Young Scholar Award in Canada. Although applicants tend to be students in geography, geomatics, forestry or environmental studies, the only eligibility requirement is that students must have used Esri technology. Projects submitted by some of the applicants include mapping the surge history of a glacier on Axel Heiberg Island, modelling suitable habitat for dolphins near Taiwan and analyzing rockfalls in the Canadian Rockies.

This year's judging panel was comprised of one college faculty member and two university faculty members. Thank you to all of them for their time and effort! The judges evaluated applicants based on the design and content of their poster as well as a brief paper summarizing their project. In addition to an overall winner, prizes were awarded to the top student at each level.

Congratulations to this year’s winners:

Top candidate in a PhD program and 2017 Esri Young Scholar for Canada: Emily Acheson, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia. The project she submitted, “ArcGIS and the fight against malaria,” is a follow-up on work she completed as a master’s student in biology and 2015 scholarship recipient at the University of Ottawa.
Top candidate in a Master's program: Dongchul Lee, Trent University. Dongchul is in the interdisciplinary Applied Modelling and Quantitative Methods program. Using Peterborough, Ontario, as a study area, his research aims to map flood risk areas and predict which areas are at highest risk of damage.
Top candidate in an undergraduate program: Sean Leipe, Earth and Environmental Sciences, McMaster University. Sean is an ECCE student associate. The project he submitted is based on his undergraduate thesis, which maps the susceptibility to calanchi-type erosion in the Basilicata region of Italy.

Visit the Esri Canada Scholars Portal to learn more about Emily, Dongchul, Sean and some of Canada’s other past Esri Young Scholars. You can also read about the experiences of the Marie-France Jones and Shane Furze, Canada’s 2016 and 2015 Esri Young Scholars, at the Education GIS Conference and Esri User Conference.