Patrick Florance

Patrick Florance is the Director of Research Technology at Tufts University, where he leads Tufts Technology Services’ support for High-Performance Computing, research storage, scientific instrumentation, and data science. He is concurrently an affiliate of the Department of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning in the School of Arts and Sciences and a senior instructor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Education

• Bachelor of Arts, University of Oregon, Eugene, United States
• Master of Arts, Geography – Geographic Information Science, City University of New York – Hunter College, New York, United States

Research & Scholarly Interests

Florance’s scholarship and service converge on the design, deployment, and governance of open-source geospatial infrastructures. His work encompasses:

• Global and humanitarian mapping, crisis mapping, and geospatial support for disaster response
• Development of the Open Geoportal (OGP) Federation — a Sloan-funded collaborative platform for sharing geospatial data across universities
• 3D GIS, remote sensing, UAV/drone workflows, and spatial data infrastructures for urban modeling
• Digital humanities, natural language processing, and data-mining approaches to historical and textual geodata
• Geospatial pedagogy, open-data advocacy, and capacity-building in the developing world

Publications & Intellectual Trajectory

Across more than two decades, Florance has authored or co-authored scholarly articles, software reviews, and special journal issues that advance both technical architectures and sociotechnical practices for geospatial information curation. His writings trace a trajectory from foundational concerns of GIS collection development in academic libraries to contemporary challenges of real-time, open, and ethical crisis mapping.

Scientific Awards & Grants

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation – Open Geoportal Cloud (OGP) Federation (US$ grant, 2013)

University Service & Leadership

Patrick chairs or serves on multiple university committees driving data-intensive research strategy:

• Data Analytics Steering Committee, School of Arts & Sciences
• Digital Humanities Steering Committee, Tufts University
• Data-Intensive Scholarship Center (DISC) Advisory Committee on Infrastructure and Services (ACIS)
• GIS Steering Committee
• Research Data Services Committee

Labs, Teams & Infrastructure

He directs the Tufts Data Lab, a campus hub for GIS, statistics, visualization, and machine-learning services, and oversees the Open Geoportal Project, a multi-institutional consortium providing federated discovery and access to geospatial data sets. His team supports thousands of researchers university-wide with high-performance compute clusters, research storage arrays, and discipline-specific scientific instrumentation.