TIF News by Stewart Walker
Quite often we include news items about awards from The ISPRS Foundation (TIF), especially travel grants to support participation in Symposia, Congresses and Geospatial Week events. TIF itself is always changing. It was a great honor for me to be invited to attend a meeting of ISPRS Council in Toronto last month, to take part in discussions and give a presentation about the status of TIF. My presentation was well received: Council seemed happy with the work of TIF and its ambition to grow. Two interesting facts that I reported bear repeating: TIF has awarded $223,129 to nearly 200 recipients since 2012; in 2019, TIF is helping to support seven Summer Schools and associated travel grants for the Student Consortium, as well as 27 travel grants for attendance at the Geospatial Week in Enschede, The Netherlands.
TIF’s affairs are the responsibility of a Board of Trustees, which can have up to 11 members, of whom two are appointed members of ISPRS Council who serve from one congress to the next (currently ISPRS President, Christian Heipke, and ISPRS Treasurer, Songnian Li). The trustees are listed at https://www.isprs.org/foundation/trustees.aspx. Last year, Dr. Mazlan Othman resigned and I am delighted to report that Council approved the appointment of a new trustee, Dr. Shailesh Nayak, Director, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru, India.
Dr. Nayak is very well known and we look forward to benefiting from his wisdom and broad network of contacts. More recently, unfortunately, another trustee, Lewis Graham, president of the GeoCue Corporation, also resigned. We are actively working to replace him and hope to have more news soon.
We have to remember that many people miss out on receiving grants because of the limited funds available, so TIF welcomes donations from individuals and companies to support its philanthropic aims. Indeed, TIF is hoping to support a large contingent of students from developing countries to attend the Congress in Nice, France, less than 14 months from now. Please consider giving generously to the activities of the ISPRS Foundation (see http://www.isprs.org/foundation/donations/default.aspx). Or consider joining TIF’s Fund-Raising Committee – send me an e-mail (foundationchair@isprs.org) if you are interested and we can talk about it. As part of our attempt to grow, TIF is in the final stages of preparing a PowerPoint presentation that will be available early next month to anyone in the ISPRS community who would like to use it to talk about the work of TIF.
Finally, I want to commend my colleagues from TIF’s Executive Committee, which takes care of the day-to-day business, John Trinder, TIF Operations Officer, and Marguerite Madden, TIF Finance Officer for the tireless, meticulous work they do to turn TIF’s objectives into reality. Thank you.