Nickolas Faust, right, has been elected to the board of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International.

Alumnus Nickolas L. Faust, associate director of Georgia Tech's Center for Geographic Information Systems and a principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute's Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory, has been elected to the board of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International.

Faust, Phys 69, MS GeoSci 76, has worked with the fund for many years to develop GIS systems that map the movements and habitat of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains of central Africa.

The Fossey Fund, which is headquartered in donated offices at Zoo Atlanta, protects and studies endangered wild gorillas in Africa and runs extensive human health, education and community development projects in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

At Georgia Tech, Faust coordinates research on remote sensing GIS systems and visualization technology, develops multispectral stimulation techniques and derives high-resolution geographic databases for selected areas of the world. He was elected to the Space Technology Hall of Fame and is a fellow in the Society of Photo-Instrumentation Engineers.

"I've been close to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International since 1999-2000, when our group from Georgia Tech began to collaborate with them, first as a volunteer and then under a grant from the Georgia Research Alliance to create a GIS/Remote Sensing Center at the National University of Rwanda," Faust said.