Melinda Laituri received her PhD in geography from the University of Arizona. Her dissertation research focused on environmental equity and groundwater resources in the American Southwest, and the US-Mexico border. Laituri accepted a postdoc position at the University of Auckland, New Zealand where she served as a lecturer in a tenure track position for three years. She is a Fulbright scholar and spent 2010 in Botswana. She was a Carson fellow in 2011, where she conducted comparative research of major rivers. Laituri is the director of the Geospatial Centroid at CSU, which provides information and support for GIS activities, education, and outreach at CSU and in Colorado. In 2014–2015, she was a Jefferson Science fellow and continues to work with the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues at the US Department of State on the Secondary Cities Initiative.

Laituri’s research interests are diverse: she has worked with indigenous peoples throughout the world on issues related to natural resource management, disaster adaptation, and water resource issues using geographic information systems (GIS) that utilize cultural and ecophysical data in research models. A key focus is participatory GIS where indigenous peoples develop spatial information and maps essential for the management of their own resources. Other research work focuses on the role of the Internet and geospatial technologies of disaster management and cross-cultural environmental histories of river basin management.