Chris Lippitt is the Associate Dean for Research at the University of Mexico (UNM) College of Arts & Sciences, the director of the (UNM) Center for the Advancement of Spatial Informatics Research & Education (ASPIRE), and the founding faculty coordinator for the Interdisciplinary Science Cooperative. He has 18 years of remote sensing and spatial modeling experience, 14 years of end-to-end remote sensing systems design experience in support public and private sector information users, and is a leading advocate for user driven design of remote sensing systems. He is the founder of two companies, including one that produced the first commercially available end-to-end drone-based mapping system in the U.S (2007). Chris holds a PhD in Geography from San Diego State University and the University of California at Santa Barbara, an M.S. in Geographic Information Science, and a B.S. in Geography from Clark University.