Profs. Bethel and Mikhail, and graduate student J. Youn (Ph.D, graduated), and Dr. C. Lee received the 2009 Talbert Abrams Grand Award for their paper "J. Youn, J. Bethel, E. Mikhail, C. Lee, 2008, Extracting Urban Road Networks from High-resolution True Orthoimage and Lidar, Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, Vol. 74, No. 2, pp. 227-237". The Talbert Abrams Award was established in 1945 to encourage the authorship and recording of current, historical, engineering, and scientific developments in photogrammetry. The Award is determined from papers published in Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing.

Prof. Shan and graduate students S. Alkheder (Ph.D, graduated) and J. Wang received the 2009 ESRI Award for Best Scientific Paper in GIS, First Place. The award was issued by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing for an outstanding paper of scientific merit that advances the knowledge of GIS technology. The award is given to the paper: "J. Shan, S. Alkheder, J. Wang, 2008, Genetic Algorithms for the Calibration of Cellular Automata Urban Growth Modeling, Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, Vol. 74, No. 10, pp. 1267-1277".