Kurt Menke, a certified GIS Professional (GISP), has been working in the GIS field since 1997. Prior to this, he worked as a professional archaeologist for 10 years in the American Southwest. He earned a master's degree (MA) in geography from the University of New Mexico in 2000. That same year, he founded Bird's Eye View (www.BirdsEyeViewGIS.com) to apply his expertise with the GIS technology to the world's mounting ecological and social problems. Toward this end, Mr. Menke's work focuses largely on wildlife conservation and public health. His specialties are spatial analysis, modeling, and cartography.
He is a longtime advocate of FOSS4G. He began writing MapServer applications in 2001 and has been using QGIS since 2007. He is one of the coauthors of the curriculum at the FOSS4G Academy (http://foss4geo.org/) and has been teaching FOSS4G college courses since 2009. In 2014, Kurt began authoring an award-winning blog on FOSS4G technologies and their use in community health mapping (http://communityhealthmaps.nlm.nih.gov/).
Dr. Richard Smith Jr., is an assistant professor of geographic information science at the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. He has a PhD in geography from the University of Georgia and holds a master of science in computer science and a bachelor of science in geographic information science degree from Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. Richard actively does research in cartography, systems integration, and the use of geospatial technology for disaster response. Richard is an advocate of FOSS4G and building FOSS4G curriculum. He is one of the coauthors of the FOSS4G Academy (http://foss4geo.org).
Richard has collaborated with other writers in his field, but Mastering QGIS is his first book.
Dr. Luigi Pirelli is a freelance software analyst and developer with an honors degree in computer science from the University of Bari. He worked for 15 years in Satellite Ground Segment and Direct Ingestion for the European Space Agency. Since 2006, he has been involved with the GFOSS world, contributing to QGIS, GRASS, and MapServer core and developing and maintaining many QGIS plugins. He actively participates in QGIS Hackmeetings. He is the founder of the OSGEO Italian Local Chapter (http://gfoss.it/drupal/) and now lives in Spain and contributes to this GFOSS community. During the last few years, he started teaching PyQGIS by organizing trainings from basic to advanced levels and supporting companies to develop their specific QGIS plugins.
He is the founder of the local hackerspace group Bricolabs.cc that is focused on Open Hardware. He likes cycling, repairing everything, and trainings groups on conflict resolution. Besides this book, he has also contributed to Lonely Planet Cycling Italy.
Dr. John Van Hoesen is an associate professor of geology and environmental studies at Green Mountain College in rural west-central Vermont. He earned an MS in 2000 and a PhD in geology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2003. He is a certified GIS Professional (GISP) with a broad background in geosciences and has been using some flavor of GIS to evaluate and explore geologic processes and environmental issues since 1997. He has used and taught some variant of FOSS GIS since 2003, and over the last 3 years, he has taught graduate, undergraduate, and continuing education courses using only FOSS GIS software.
