Nicholas A. Giudice, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering

University of Maine

Office: 325 Boardman Hall

Phone:   207-581-2187  

Fax: 207-581-2206

Nick's Email

Curriculum Vita

My primary academic position / affiliation is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering at the University of Maine, with cooperative appointments in the UMaine National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) and UMaine’s Department of Psychology. I started in September of 2008 and have been extremely happy with my decision. My department is highly collaborative (something I strongly believe benefits research), I like the size of the campus (I have been at much bigger and smaller institutions and find that around 14,000 students is about perfect), and I love getting back to my New England roots (I grew up in Connecticut but lived in Minnesota and California for ten years before taking this job at UMaine). The most exciting part of my position has been the opportunity to build a lab from the ground up. Developing the VEMI Lab has been extremely gratifying and would not have been possible without the support and hard work of a talented group of staff and students. Thanks all! We are also fortunate to have several sources of external support which are funding some exciting projects (described elsewhere throughout this website).

Prior to coming to UMaine, I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow from 2005-2008 with Prof. Jack Loomis in the Cognition, Perception, and Cognitive Neuroscience Program in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). My postdoctoral research dealt with the design of multimodal interfaces for navigation as well as several lines of research on functional equivalence. During the time of my postdoc, UCSB was a hotbed of spatial research, comprising some of the best-known spatial cognition researchers in the world. I learned immeasurably from my experiences with the folks in the UCSB spatial community, especially discussions with Jack Loomis and Dan Montello, who in very different ways, challenged me with many of the same provocations.

Prior to my postdoc, I attended graduate school at the University of Minnesota, receiving my Ph.D. in Cognitive and Biological Psychology in Fall of 2004. My graduate research investigated the development of dynamically-updated verbal interfaces to support spatial learning and wayfinding behavior of complex real and virtual buildings, with and without vision. My primary graduate advisor was Prof. Gordon Legge, who is Director of the Minnesota Laboratory for Low-Vision Research. Gordon’s lab has a rich history in the study of psychophysics of reading, issues of low vision, and most recently, spatial navigation. My other graduate advisor was Prof. Herbert Pick, director of the Spatially-Coordinated Behavioral Laboratory.  Herb’s lab is involved with many aspects of perception and action. Some of his work deals with sensory adaptation and recalibration, whereas other research is directed more specifically toward issues of navigation and wayfinding behavior.

My undergraduate work was done at Providence College, a small liberal arts school in Providence, Rhode Island, where I studied Experimental Psychology and Philosophy. I credit Profs. Clint Anderson (now deceased) and George Raymond as the first people to truly fire me up about the connection between neurophysiology, perception, and cognition. This initial excitement changed the trajectory of my studies and was the genesis of my current research interests in multimodal spatial cognition.

Other random things about me:

I'm intrigued by paradox, enjoy doing new things, and will try most things twice. People tend to either love or hate me and unlike most, I don't mind that this is the case. Friends and family are very important to me, as is being true to what I believe. I love conversation (there's nothing like a good debate), music (don't play it but enjoy making it sound good), eating (I love food, except olives (of all sizes and shapes)) and beer (except for American lagers (which really aren't beer any way)). I greatly enjoy philosophy; my main philosophical interests are matters of mind/brain, objective/subjective distinctions, perceptual boundaries/asymmetries and sensory deprivation (I admit it, I used to own a sensory deprivation tank). I think best when not having to fight the inexorable forces of gravity; a realization that has led me to own more pieces of reclining furniture than anybody else I know. Despite this predilection for reclination, I greatly enjoy being active, especially doing outdoor activities.  I have a custom-built recumbent tandem bike which I like to speed on. I also enjoy hiking and camping, although I don’t get to do it enough of late. My guide dog (Uro) and I both enjoy water, although he prefers fetching sticks whereas I am more partial to swimming and boating.