Shashi Shekhar is a McKnight Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota. He was elected an IEEE fellow and received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award for contributions to spatial database storage methods, data mining, and geographic information systems(GIS). He co-authored a textbook on Spatial Databases and served as a member of the Mapping Science Committee of the National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences). He is serving as a co-Editor-in-Chief of Geo-Informatica: An International Journal on Advances in Computer Sc. for GIS; and a member of the steering committee of the ACM Intl. Conference on GIS.