We are pleased to announce that Lucia Mabel van der Heijden (geb. Ganchozo Llano), a 2024 postgraduate of our Cartography M.Sc. program, has received an Honorable Mention in the IPGH Award for the Outstanding Postgraduate's thesis . IPGH (Pan American Institute of Geography and History) aims to promote and recognize outstanding postgraduate research in cartography, geodesy and geographic information science.

Lucia’s master thesis, titled “Slum Mapping toward SDG 11 Using Urban Morphology and Topology” presents an advanced analytical approach for mapping informal settlements, supporting global efforts toward achieving UN Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. Her work demonstrates how spatial morphology and topological features can improve the understanding and delineation of slum areas.

The thesis was supervised by our Chair's PhD researcher, M.Sc. Dongsheng Chen. His research interests are city mechanism, urban modeling, urban morphology, Urban AI towards sustainable urban systems and SDGs [1, 2]. And the thesis was reviewed by Drs. B.J. Köbben (University of Twente). The examination committee was chaired by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Liqiu Meng.

We also extend our warmest congratulations to Nicolás Martínez Heredia, a fellow postgraduate of the same Cartography M.Sc. program from the Technical University of Vienna, who received an First Prize for his own outstanding work.

References:

[1] Wei Tu, Dongsheng Chen*, et al. "Towards SDG 11: Large-scale geographic and demographic characterisation of informal settlements fusing remote sensing, POI, and open geo-data." ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 217 (2024): 199-215.

[2] Dongsheng Chen, et al. "A hierarchical approach for fine-grained urban villages recognition fusing remote and social sensing data." International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation 106 (2022): 102661.