As the Executive Director of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) from 2003-2019, Douglas Richardson led a highly successful renewal of the organization. He greatly expanded its membership and international footprint, developed dynamic and wide-ranging new research initiatives, and built strong academic, publishing, and financial foundations for the AAG, and for geography’s future. 

Prior to joining the AAG, Dr. Richardson founded and was the president of GeoResearch, Inc., a scientific research firm that developed and patented the world’s first real-time space-time interactive GPS/GIS functionality, which has transformed the ways in which geospatial data and geographic information is now collected, experienced, mapped, and used within geography and other disciplines, and in society at large. The concepts, technologies and innovations pioneered by Richardson and GeoResearch are now ubiquitous and at the heart of a wide array of real-time interactive mapping, navigation, mobile computing and consumer devices such as cell phones, and location-based business applications. They also have become central to the real-time management of day-to-day core operations of large-scale governmental entities, corporations, and international NGOs.

Richardson sold his company and its core patents in 1998, and has since continued to develop the field of real-time space-time integration in geography and GIScience through international and interdisciplinary geospatial research in areas such as health, sustainable environmental and economic development, human rights, coupled human-natural systems, and more recently the integration of spatial concepts, data, and analysis in the humanities and social sciences.