European Forum of Geography and Statistics has pleasure to inform that Marja Tammilehto-Luode was awarded the very first “Lars H. Backer Prize” at EFGS 2016 Conference in Paris.
Marja Tammilehto-Luode and Janusz Dygaszewicz
Marja Tammilehto-Luode has been a leading figure in the development of European Spatial Statistics since the accession of Finland to the EU in 1995. Among her many outstanding achievements are the introduction of GIS in Statistics Finland and its application to population statistics and the development of small area and grid based statistical geographies for Finland.
Marja has also been one of the driving forces in Finland and the Nordic countries behind using geocoded registers for population and housing censuses.
Marja is a long standing member of the GISCO working group and of many other international expert groups, e.g. the UN-GGIM Expert Group on the integration of statistics and geospatial information. She is also one of the founders of the Nordic Forum for Geostatistics and the European Forum for Geography and Statistics (EFGS) where she is a member of the Steering Committee.
She has been involved as key expert in many European and international projects such as the Tandem I and II Projects together with Lars Backer on a harmonised small area output system for Europe, or the GEOSTAT projects on the development of a point based spatial reference system for statistics.
Since the enter into force of the INSPIRE directive she has also been a leading expert in implementing INSPIRE in National Statistical Institute and using INSPIRE for the dissemination of statistics, e.g. through the inclusion of grid statistics in the Finish geoportal.
She is a co-author of some of the most influential reports on European geospatial statistics over the last 15 years such as the Tandem reports and the GEOSTAT reports.