Ellen-Wien Augustijn has been working for ITC since 2000. From 1994 – 2000 she was a member of the GIS group at the International Agricultural College Larenstein (Netherlands) and from 1990 till 1993 she worked as a researcher in the soil and water science GIS unit at the University of Florida (USA).

At ITC she is a lecturer and researcher, since 2010 part of the University of Twente. She has been a  member of the GIP (Geo-Information Processing) management team as portfolio holder "project services" from 2002-2006. During 2013 she spent a sabbatical at Purdue University in the USA.

Ellen-Wien has extensive experience in education. She is involved as both a coordinator and as a teacher in several of the ITC modules for different levels of students. The topics of her lectures mainly focus on GIS data structures, analysis and Agent-based Modeling. Besides her teaching tasks she is also involved in several distance-learning courses (e.g. GIMA – Geographical Information Management and Applications and the ITC E-Core modules), the MOOC GeoHealth and in international training courses on location (e.g. India, 2016).

Over the years Ellen-Wien has supervised a large group of MSc students during their final research project, including students from GFM, GIMA and other institutes. For many years she was a member of the Gima program committee. She published several papers on educational topics. Recently she was involved in the development of the Living Textbook, a combination of a Wiki and concept map that allows students to see how concepts are related to each other. Over the years, Ellen-Wien has been involved in many educational development teams, creating a range of new courses. She is also one of the organizers of the yearly course on “Using Geographic Information (GIS) in disease control programmes” together with The Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam.

Keywords in the research interest of Ellen-Wien Augustijn are Agent-based Modeling (ABM), Geocomputation and disease modeling.

Over the years Ellen-Wien developed a range of Agent-based simulation models for a variety of applications, ranging from evacuation, growth of informal settlements to disease diffusion. Ellen-Wien is specialized in spatial ABMs in which both the geo-environment and human behavior are important factors. Currently her research focusses on behavior change and the implementation of artificial intelligence in ABMs.

Geo-computational methods used by Ellen-Wien are Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), Bayesian Networks, Neural Networks and different types of clustering. She uses these methods to cluster times series of disease data in order to compare the spatio-temporal diffusion patterns of empirical data to the patterns found in simulated data.

Health applications are an important theme in the work of Ellen-Wien. She developed ABMs for several disease diffusion processes including the diffusion of cholera in Ghana, pertussis in the Netherlands and leprosy in Indonesia. She applied SOMs to study the spatio-temporal diffusion of measles in Iceland and pertussis in the Netherlands.

Activities in capacity development

Ellen-Wien has conducted various assignments for international developing organizations, mainly in Asia (India, Philippines, Sri Lanka) and Africa (Rwanda and Tanzania). Topics of these projects include setting up GIS curricula for educational institutes and teaching courses both in face to face education and different types of distance learning. One of her latest projects involved the development of a MOOC and face to face course in India on Advanced applications GeoHealth (2016) as part of a Nuffic refresher course.