GIST Director Dr. Chris Lukinbeal Awarded the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers Distinguished Service Award

Congratulations to Dr. Chris Lukinbeal, Director of UA GIST for being awarded the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers Distinguished Service Award!
APCG Distinguished Service Award 
For more than two decades, Christopher Lukinbeal has been active and engaging in the affairs of the APCG, first as a student and then as a faculty.  Chris received the President’s Award for the best graduate student paper presented to the APCG annual meeting in 1995.  Since that date he has presented more than a dozen papers to our annual meetings and has published four papers in the association Yearbook.  In 1999 and 2000, Lukinbeal was an APCG team member in the World Geography Bowl held at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers.  From 2004-2008, Chris was the APCG Regional Faculty Coordinator for World Geography Bowl at the annual meetings of the AAG.
Chris Lukinbeal’s service to the APCG has been extraordinary.  From 2004-2008, Lukinbeal was the APCG Web Master.  On two separate occasions, he was a co-coordinator and organizer of our annual meetings, first in 2005 for the Phoenix conference, and again in 2014 for the Tucson gathering.  These were two of the most successful annual meetings of the last two decades, both by the number of attendees and participants and by the financial success of those events that benefited the APCG.  In 2013-2014, Chris served as the APCG vice-president, and he advanced to the presidency in the following year.
Lukinbeal’s intellectual contributions to the APCG started with his first paper presentation—titled “Dick Tracy’s Cityscape”—to the annual meeting in Bellingham, WA in 1993.  Over the following nearly three decades, Chris has become a leading voice in geography for research and writing about representation, visualization, media, and cinema as vehicles for understanding place.  He is the founding editor of Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, the founding director of Geographic Information Systems Technology Programs at the University of Arizona, and the author of four books about media geography, media mapping, place studies in television, and the geography of cinema.  Chris’s passion for his chosen subject has resulted in multiple international visiting appointments, including his role as one of the founding editors for a media book series published by the Institute of Geography, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany.
Beyond his dedication to the APCG and his scholarly contributions, Chris has consistently encouraged students to academic achievement including many instances of prompting their participation in our association.  His own geographic roots are in the Pacific Coast having earned his Ph. D. at San Diego State University and the University of California at Santa Barbara.Today, he is a Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona.
In recognition of these many contributions to the APCG, we are honored to present Chris Lukinbeal the Distinguished Service Award for 2021.