Tom Cova is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Utah in
Salt Lake City. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University
of Oregon and an M.A. and Ph.D in Geography from the University of California
Santa Barbara. His research lies at the nexus of transportation, hazards, and
geographic information systems (GIS). The 1991 Oakland-Berkeley Fire inspired
him to research human vulnerability in fire-prone communities. He initially
proposed a GIS-based method to identify fire-prone neighborhoods with poor
access, but this evolved into simulating evacuations to test various emergency
planning strategies such as lane-based routing. He is the Director of the GIScience
Certificate Program and the Associate Director for Research in the Center for
Natural and Technological Hazards in the Geography Department.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications
Cova, T.J., and Conger, S. (2004) Transportation hazards, in Transportation
Engineers' Handbook, M. Kutz (ed.), in press.

Cova, T.J., and Johnson, J.P. (2003) A network flow model for lane-based
evacuation routing, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice,
in press.

Cova, T.J. (2002) Like a bat out of hell: simulating wildfire evacuations in the urban
interface, Wildland Firefighter Magazine, November, 24-29.

Cova, T.J., and Johnson, J.P. (2002) Microsimulation of neighborhood evacuations
in the urban-wildland interface, Environment and Planning A, 34:12, 2211-2229.

Cova, T.J., and Goodchild, M.F. (2002) Extending geographical representation to
include fields of spatial objects, International Journal of Geographical Information
Science, 16:6, 509-532.

Radke, J., Cova, T., Sheridan, M.F., Troy, A., Lan, M., and Johnson, R. (2000)
Application challenges for GIScience: implications for research, education, and
policy for risk assessment, emergency preparedness and response, Urban and
Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) Journal, 12:2, 15-30.

Cova, T.J. (1999) GIS in emergency management. In: Geographical Information
Systems: Principles, Techniques, Applications, and Management, P.A. Longley,
M.F. Goodchild, D.J. Maguire, D.W. Rhind (eds.), John Wiley & Sons, New York,
845-858.

Cova, T.J., and Church, R.L. (1997) Modelling community evacuation vulnerability
using GIS. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 11(8), 763-784.