With roots in geography and a reach into subjects ranging from music and psychology to black studies, spatial thinking is big at UC Santa Barbara. It all comes together at the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies, known as spatial@ucsb.

UCSB Geography Professor Michael Goodchild is making the case for space. The problem with much of modern science, he says, it that it’s neither here nor there. Physicists, psychologists, sociologists and other students of the human and natural worlds look for the rules that, like the laws of quantum mechanics, apply without respect to where things are. “It has become customary to strip away context,” he says. As the director of UCSB’s new Center for Spatial Studies— known as spatial@ucsb—Goodchild is now working to put that context back.

Known worldwide as a leader in the theory and development of geographic information systems (GIS), Goodchild is not alone in his zeal for spatial thinking. Not just in the sciences, but also in the arts and humanities, UCSB already has a strong spatial emphasis, exemplified in a wide array of research efforts and creative initiatives that involve spatial analysis, technology and presentation. spatial@ucsb now acts as a nerve center and help desk for all this activity.

One goal of spatial@ucsb is to promote spatial thinking in academia and beyond. That includes explaining what spatial thinking is and why it’s so important. Another aim is to raise UCSB’s profile and influence, as spatial thinking and spatial technologies assume greater importance in science, technology, business, and everyday life.

At a basic cognitive level, spatial thinking is three-dimensional perception and recall. Strong spatial thinkers can easily recognize the same assembly of blocks in different positions (in so-called “mental rotation” tests). They always turn in the right direction when leaving buildings and never have trouble locating their cars in parking lots. Well-developed spatial thinking leads to spatial literacy—the capacity to learn about, analyze and explain the natural and social worlds through spatial visualization, technologies such as GIS, and spatial displays such as maps.

Spatial thinking has long played a crucial role in physical and social science. It has led to breakthroughs as varied as the discovery of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, a tour de force of three-dimensional visualization, and the curbing of deadly diseases. In the 1850s, surgeon John Snow helped end a cholera epidemic by drawing a simple map that showed how new cases of the disease in one London neighborhood clustered around a water pump, which authorities then closed. A century later, researchers discovered the link between asbestos and cancer by noting the high incidence of the disease near locations where “liberty ship” freighters were built during World War II.

The Near and Far of It All
What these examples have in common is a concern for how things and people exist in space—their height, depth, width, shape, and relation in space, typically expressed in terms of x,y, and z axes. How near and far they are to other things (or people) is crucial. So are all the data tied to the same location. Where two or more things happen at the same place—like cancer cases clustered around shipyards—spatial analysis may uncover cause-and-effect links that otherwise could remain buried in statistics.

Spatial thinking is at the core of several important physical sciences, including geography, epidemiology, geology, meteorology, and environmental sciences in general. It also plays an increasingly important role in social sciences—UCSB’s Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS) is devoted specifically to that role.

Don Janelle, spatial@ucsb program director, says, “One of the benefits of the spatial perspective is that it’s an incubator for interdisciplinary work” (Janelle, a research professor of Geography and the Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research, also directs the program SPACE —Spatial Perspectives for Analysis and Curriculum Enhancement—at CSISS). “The block where you live has its own politics, health patterns, demographics and culture. It’s all there; the spatial perspective gives you a way to integrate it,” he says.

At UCSB alone, says Janelle, spatial analysis has attracted the interest of faculty in the Departments of Mathematics, Anthropology, Religious Studies, Psychology, Music and Black Studies, to name just a few. UCSB’s new Allosphere—a spherical enclosure three stories high, used for creating and studying 3-D phenomena in light and sound—is a nexus for spatial research in the arts as well as engineering, quantum physics and nanoscience.

Why a Spatial Center?
spatial@ucsb has its roots in geography and in Goodchild’s work with GIS, the computing technology that processes and analyzes location-linked data. In 1988, he won a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation to set up the lead site of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. The mission of this research consortium was to “interact as widely as possible” with scientists worldwide, he says, rather than focusing on building resources at Santa Barbara. This was one reason why he began thinking about a new kind of program, designed to foster a community of spatial thinkers at UCSB, including arts and humanities as well as sciences.

His idea became reality in 2007, when spatial@ucsb started up, with a three-year commitment from the office of UCSB Chancellor Henry Yang. Goodchild’s goal is to put spatial@ucsb on a solid, long-term foundation of funding from private donors and research grants.

The center has a large menu of activities, including academic presentations (the “ThinkSpatial” public lectures and “brown bag” lunch-hour events), regular meetings of graduate students from different disciplines to share research interests involving spatial perspectives, workshops on spatial tools and their applications, and the UCSB Spatial Review, a Web portal to examples of spatial perspectives from across the university. Expanding the use of GIS is another important part of the spatial@ucsb agenda. The center offers a course in GIS for graduate students, and it offers drop-in consultation to help UCSB faculty and students design GIS programs for their research or creative projects.

spatial@ucsb acts as a GIS resource for UCSB researchers who “are trained to use numbers and words,” says Black Studies Professor George Lipsitz. “The existence of spatial@ucsb is essential for us to get knowledge that, as a small department, we wouldn’t otherwise have.” For instance, Janelle introduced Black Studies researchers to Social Explorer, an online site that produces detailed maps from Census data going back to 1940. Lipsitz says Social Explorer is “especially useful for [tracking] migration and neighborhood change.”

Spatial analysis is an important tool for Lipsitz (who focuses on topics such as housing discrimination and the impact of transportation on access to jobs) and for several other Black Studies researchers. One is Clyde Woods, who, says Lipsitz, “works at the intersection of race and space” by analyzing black migration patterns. Another is Gaye Johnson, who uses geographic analysis in her studies of black and Mexican relations in Los Angeles. Lipsitz says GIS is a “wonder” in the detail of economic and social data that can be processed and displayed geographically. “You can do readings of banks vs. payday lenders, and grocery stores vs. liquor stores.”

Interfacing with Computer Science
spatial@ucsb also helps continue the interaction of geography and computer science that created modern GIS technology. It has close ties with the Four Eyes Lab (the name stands for Imaging, Interaction and Innovative Interfaces), where UCSB computer scientists work on improving human-computer interaction and creating display systems that mimic 3-D reality. Four Eyes co-director Tobias Hõllerer recently gave a spatial@ucsb brown-bag talk on the lab’s work with “anywhere augmentation,” a merging of GIS, global positioning and mobile computing in portable systems that enable users to “annotate any physical object wherever they go.” By simply pointing to an object, such as a building, one could mark it for others who are using the same database… The other co-director, Matthew Turk, says spatial@ucsb gives computer scientists “gives computer scientists access to data and spatial computation problems that we wouldn’t otherwise know about, giving rise to new opportunities for collaboration.”

The mission of spatial@ucsb goes well beyond the promotion of geographic ideas and tools, important as these are. Janelle says it is “not trying to impose a geographic discipline” on other fields of study. The center treats spatial thinking as essential to disciplines that never get near a map.

The center’s research network reaches into cognitive science and education, for instance. Professor of Psychology Mary Hegarty, a member of spatial@ucsb’s executive committee, researches spatial thinking from two angles. One is to study how people read visual displays such as maps and diagrams. Her other focus is on spatial thinking ability and the question of whether it can be taught.

The jury is out on the teachabilty of spatial thinking, Hegarty says, but she points out that it is a crucial skill in a number of fields. Chemists need it to visualize molecular structure. Radiologists must be able to visualize tissue in three dimensions using layers of two-dimensional images, and surgeons need to navigate through the body in three dimensions. Not everyone is blessed with the same level or type of spatial intelligence. Hegarty says men are better than women at mental rotation tests, while women are better at others, such as remembering an array of objects and spotting the ones that have moved. But she says it’s important to make everyone as good a spatial thinker as he or she can be, just as schools try to increase everyone’s verbal skills even though “we know there are differences in verbal ability.”

Arts and the Allosphere
Spatial thinking plays an important role in the arts and is central to some, such as sculpture. Art and spatial science come together at the Allosphere, housed at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). The structure was completed in 2007 and is now being equipped with speakers and projectors. When all the audio and video elements (including 500 speakers) are in place, the Allosphere will be able to simulate 3-D environments and structures at all scales, from the atomic to the cosmic.

The Allosphere’s director, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, says images will be projected in real time—from an MRI, for instance—so that “people can stand inside the cortex of a colleague’s brain.” Kuchera-Morin, a Media Arts and Technology professor who also has collaborated on research with Goodchild since the mid-1990s, says the Allosphere offers the possibility of presenting data “in new and exciting ways” such as “sonifying” it—turning it into sound. The facility also will serve as a lab for 3-D movie technology and a venue for visualizing structures as minute as quantum dots. In these ways, the Allosphere represents a new technological leap for spatial thinking, though the objective is not fundamentally different from what Watson and Crick were doing 55 years ago. Now, as then, scientists are trying to think about things as they really are—in space, in context—and artists are trying to create works as close as possible to real life.

The human eye is a wonder of nature that has not given up all its mysteries, at least not yet. One of these is why, with age, it so often deteriorates in a way that leads progressively to blindness. Is this disease inevitable, just the price of growing old? Or can it be stopped?

Scientists with UCSB’s Center for the Study of Macular Degeneration (CSMD) believe it can be stopped and have been working toward that goal for more than a decade. Focusing on the cells, proteins and genetic factors that affect the aging eye, they have shed light on what really happens when sight declines. In the process, they are showing the way toward drugs that could eventually prevent or reverse this all-too-common condition.

“I hate to be in the prediction business determining when a drug will be available,” says Don Anderson, a research biologist and director of CSMD. But the center’s work is giving potential drug developers a clearer idea of the chain of events that leads to macular degeneration, and of what might be done to stop it. Anderson says CSMD has achieved breakthroughs in basic research that now enable it to move to the “application phase” – finding ways to put that research to work.

CSMD, set up in 1995 as a research unit within UCSB’s Neuroscience Research Institute, focuses on age-related macular degeneration, usually referred to as AMD. It had a more informal start earlier in the decade in the sharing of ideas between Anderson and two other scientists. One of them, research biologist Lincoln V. Johnson, was at the University of Southern California and came to UCSB in 1995. The other, Gregory Hageman, had worked with Johnson in post-doctoral research during the 1980s and then went to the University of Iowa, where he is a professor of ophthalmology and visual science. Johnson says the three shared a common interest in macular degeneration and started a close collaboration that has continued to this day.

A Timely Target

Why macular degeneration? “It was an acute and growing problem in society because of the aging population,” says Johnson.

The disease was (and is) a timely target. According to the National Eye Institute, AMD is the leading cause of irreversible blindness in developed countries, and is widespread among the elderly in this country. The NEI estimated in 2004 that more than 1.7 million Americans had advanced AMD with vision loss.

Another 7.3 million had intermediate AMD and were at substantial risk of losing vision. The aging of the Baby Boomers will make the disease even more common unless more effective treatments for it are found. The NEI projected that 2.9 million would have advanced AMD by 2020.

AMD attacks the macula (Latin for “spot”), an area on the retina that is dense with cone cells designed for high acuity. Its breakdown affects the center of vision, impairing the ability to read, drive or do anything else that requires visual focus. With so little known about the cause of AMD, scientists have been limited to trial-and-error methods for treating symptoms. For early AMD, Vitamin E and antioxidants seem to do some good. Drugs also have been developed to treat the “wet” form of AMD, marked by abnormal growth of blood vessels. These medicines are effective, but they must be injected regularly into the eye. They also catch the disease at a late stage and they only help one part of the AMD population. Anderson says only about 10% to 15% of those diagnosed with early AMD eventually get the “wet” form.

Anderson, Johnson and Hageman took a different line of attack, seeking to understand the molecular and cellular basis of AMD so that drugs might be developed to keep it from starting in the first place. The three started by focusing on the composition of drusen (German for “geodes”), the yellow or white deposits that accumulate at the macula in early AMD. Screening a large number of human eyes using antibodies, they found that drusen contained vitronectin, a protein that regulates the complement cascade, a chain reaction in which proteins of the immune system identify and kill microbes.

That was the initial pathway discovery for us,” says Anderson. It suggested that the formation of drusen may be the result of an immune response. They eventually found drusen to contain at least a dozen proteins that were associated with the complement system, as part of the cascade or in regulating it.

Focusing on Factor H

In 2001 and 2002, they published articles laying out these results. “We concluded that drusen were actually consequences of local inflammation,” says Anderson. “That set the stage for targeting the complement system as a likely factor in AMD.” Working with a number of other U.S. and European scientists including Rando Allikmets, a Columbia University geneticist specializing in eye disorders, they analyzed the genetic basis of the complement proteins in drusen and homed in on one in particular – the complement regulator protein Factor H. They found that a variant of the Factor H gene, present in about 20% to 25% of Americans of European origin, was associated with a high susceptibility to AMD. Those having one copy of the variant were two to three time more susceptible to the disease; two copies raised the risk by a factor of six or seven.

In 2005, Hageman, Anderson Johnson, Allikmets and their co-workers published these results, Anderson says this news of a genetic connection to AMD developed into a “fairly dramatic media event,” with Hageman briefing members of Congress and their staffs on the discovery, and federal health officials heralding it as a validation of the Human Genome Project.

Applying this knowledge to the prevention and cure of AMD could be a long and uncertain process. But Anderson and Johnson say several therapeutic routes have emerged from the CSMD’s research. Since AMD is linked to inflammation, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs – a class that includes aspirin and ibuprofin) might be useful in treating the disease. Gene therapy is another option. Anderson says a virus might be programmed “to coax the liver into making good Factor H” (the liver is a major source of complement proteins). It also may be possible to develop a drug that mimics the action of good Factor H. With any of these approaches, Anderson says it would not be necessary to prevent AMD permanently, just to postpone it to a point beyond the typical lifespan. “If you could delay the disease by 10 or 20 years, you would effectively cure it,” he says.

Beyond AMD

The center’s work on AMD may be just a starting point for understanding and treating some of the most common diseases of aging. Anderson says the Factor H research may prove relevant wherever there is an “inflammatory component,” as is the case in Alzheimer’s and atherosclerosis. CSMD also has plenty of knowledge-producing potential in its technology. Helped by funding from the National Eye Institute, it has “managed to put together an impressive genomics and proteomics laboratory,” says Dennis Clegg, professor and chairman of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at UCSB.

Clegg, a neurobiologist who specializes in cell adhesion and retinal development, has his lab next-door to CSMD and says he collaborates with it “quite heavily” (he is also a CSMD member and works with Johnson on research into the use of embryonic stem cells to replace damaged eye cells). The CSMD lab has advanced equipment for automated genomic analysis, enabling researchers to look at the process of gene expression – the conversion of a gene’s DNA sequence into RNA and proteins – at any stage of a disease. This is “an invaluable technique to have in your repertoire,” Clegg says. Likewise for the CSMD as a whole. The center offers a model of long, successful collaboration that may prove to be invaluable for many other researchers fighting many other diseases.