George Hepner

George Hepner was a professor in the Department of Geography from 1990 to 2019. He received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 1979. In 1990 he was recruited from Florida State University to serve as chair of Geography at University of Utah. He was chair during a period of transformation in the department, changing its emphasis from teaching to research (1990-1996). He again served as chair from 2010 to 2013.

Professor Hepner’s research interests included land resources analysis and management, geographic information science and remote sensing, geography of international terrorism, and remote sensing industry policy and workforce development. From 2000 to 2013, he was Director of the EPA-funded Southwest Consortium for Environmental Research and Policy (SCERP). SCERP was a consortium of five U.S. and four Mexican universities focusing on environmental issues on the U.S.-Mexico border. Professor Hepner was a research scientist and consultant at JPL and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, where he worked on the development of  artificial neural networks for image processing, and emergency mapping of diffusion clouds. Professor Hepner was President of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) and is an ASPRS Fellow.