2019 Speakers

Deirdre Dalpiaz Bishop is chief of the Geography Division at the U.S. Census Bureau, where she leads a staff of over 200 employees in the development of a national geospatial database.  This database of addresses, roads, and boundaries creates the foundation used to support the 2020 Census and ongoing surveys. 

 

Prior to her current role, Deirdre served as chief of the Decennial Census Management Division, where she implemented the 2020 Census Research and Testing Program and completed the 2020 Census Operational Plan three years ahead of last decade.  The operational plan outlines the design of the 2020 Census and provides details about the thirty-five 2020 Census operations.  

 

Deirdre received her master’s degree in public administration from New York University and her bachelor’s degree in urban studies from Lehigh University. She is a graduate of the Department of Commerce’s Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program and was three times honored with the Census Bureau’s Bronze Medal Award.  Deirdre is the President of the U.S. National Section of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History.  She is Head of the United States Delegation for the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management. 

Alfredo holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Urban Planning and a GIS Certification from Arizona State University. Additionally, he is currently working on a master’s in aviation management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He is married with two young children and a newborn.

 

Alfredo has been working for the City of New Haven, Connecticut for 3 years. He is currently the sole Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analyst/Coordinator for the City of New Haven, in which he manages and maintains all the GIS infrastructure, applications, and content. In this capacity, he is helping to develop a data governance committee in cooperation with the Mayor’s office and other City departments as well as developing a transformative platform for interdepartmental interaction and coordination through the implementation of advanced tools and applications using the GIS platform. This is an ambitious project that will likely take years to come to fruition, but it is a project that has the potential to have a lasting transformative effect on the way the city does business.

 

Additionally, Alfredo was also the recipient of a 2019 Special Achievement Award from Esri for his work in advancing the use of GIS and spatial data analysis at the City of New Haven.

Ben Kiernan is the A.Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Professor of International and Area Studies at Yale University. Founding Director of the Genocide Studies Program ( gsp.yale.edu ) from 1994 to 2015, he has also served as Chair of the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies. His books include How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985); The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (1996); Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2007); Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007); and Việt Nam : A History from Earliest Times to the Present (2017).

 

Blood and Soil won the Independent Publishers’ 2008 gold medal for the best work of history, and the U.S. German Studies Association’s 2009 Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize for the best book dealing with the Holocaust in its broadest context. Its German translation was Nonfiction Book of the Month. His other awards include the 2002 Critical Asian Studies Prize for his anthology Conflict and Change in Cambodia, and an Honourable Mention in the 2006 Canadian National Magazine Awards for a co- authored article “Bombs over Cambodia.” Kiernan’s work has appeared in twelve languages. It is featured in Southeast Asia: Essential Readings, and in Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide.

 

For over thirty years Ben Kiernan documented the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime and worked to bring the perpetrators to justice. At Yale he founded the Cambodian Genocide Program, which under his direction, established the Documentation Center of Cambodia, uncovered the archives of the Khmer Rouge secret police, detailed the case for an international tribunal, and won multiple internet awards.

Walter Jetz holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Adjunct Professor in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale University. His group works at the intersection of ecology, evolution, geography, and environmental sciences.

 

His data-driven research addresses the mechanisms underpinning the large-scale variation of biodiversity and the resulting implications for conservation. He uses remote sensing, phylogenetic, functional, and spatiotemporal biodiversity data combined with new modeling approaches and informatics tools.

 

Walter Jetz is Director of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, Lead of Map of Life, GEO BON Working Group Co-Lead, Chair of the IPBES Task Group on Indicators, and Scientific Chair of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.