Dr. Robert K. Vincent is Professor of Geology and co-founder and former Director of OhioView, a remote sensing consortium of the 10 largest public research universities in the state of Ohio. He is also the founder and CEO of GeoSpectra Corporation and one of this country´s leading experts in Remote Sensing. 

Dr. Vincent's 1997 text, Fundamentals of Geological and Environmental Remote Sensing, affirms his commitment to higher education, where he teaches geological and environmental remote-sensing as well as solid earth geophysics at the graduate level. 

He is the architect of the ATOM (Automatic Topographic Mapper) software package which automates photogrammetry, creating a world of digital holography.  ATOM was featured in the November 1988 issue of National Geographic and the November, 1991 NOVA series on PBS.  He has performed as consultant, data processor, and interpreter of satellite data for a number of major oil and mining companies, particularly pertaining to the applications of geological remote sensing to mineral exploration. 

In 1994 he advised NASA´s Stennis Space Center evaluating the EOCAP program, an effort to commercialize remote sensing. He has guided diverse GeoSpectra programs which have mapped the coastal zone of South Carolina, performed research for the U. S. Bureau of Land Management leading to systems for monitoring grasslands from satellite data, and developed new methods for measuring soil trafficability for the U.S. Navy.  

Dr. Vincent has served as consultant to the NASA Planetary Radar Working Group, to the U.S. Army Expert Working Group on the Remote Detection of Mines, and as Chairman of the Infrared Panel of the Geosat Committee.  Dr. Vincent had contractual responsibilities for the creation and maintenance of the Earth Resources Spectral Information System of the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.  He was a principal investigator for NASA on both LANDSAT-I and SKYLAB Earth resources experiments and served on an ad hoc committee to advise NASA´s Planetology Unit on geological remote sensing in the solar system.  In 1973 he became head of Terrestrial Applications at the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan.  Dr. Vincent has been a pioneer in multi-spectral scanner ratio imaging methods, inventing spectral ratio imaging (1970) and the first to produce spectral ratio images from aircraft and satellite scanner data.

With recent NASA Glenn/OhioView funding Professor Vincent is leading separate research teams in mapping toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie, determining the geometric accuracy of LANDSAT 7 terrain-corrected and Level 1 data, and investigating public health and agricultural uses of remote sensing in Northwest Ohio. He also has had grants from USGS, Hughes and the Boeing Company. He was among 237 American scientists recently invited by the Department of Defense for the first annual Scientists Helping America Conference in Washington, D.C.

Department of Geology
190 Overman Hall
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403-0218

Phone: (419) 372-0160
Fax: (419) 372-7205