EDUCATION AND EARLY YEARS POST GRADUATION

Geoffreyjen Edwards, in addition to his developing career as an author, is also a retired scientist with a highly polyvalent and unusual career. In 1979 he completed a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree in Physics at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada, followed by an M.Sc. in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1987, both at Laval University in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. His doctoral dissertation consisted of a deep sky survey (Astrophysics) for distant quasars at the North Galactic Pole and hence dealt with a study of the large-scale structure of the universe. During this same period, Dr. Edwards published articles in addition to those devoted to quasar surveys and cosmology, on automated image analysis algorithms and the study of magnetically active stars.

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ACADEMIC CAREER

Following his doctorate, Dr. Edwards found a position in 1987 at the Remote Sensing Laboratory in the Department of Geomatics Sciences at Laval University, where he remained for the duration of his thirty plus year career, although his areas of research shifted dramatically over the course of that period. During the period from 1982 to 1999, he published over 200 scientific papers, whose subjects include the classification of remote sensing imagery, image segmentation and pattern recognition techniques in Artificial Intelligence, natural language processing that addresses issues of spatial knowledge, the development of spatio-temporal data structures, the formal characterisation of spatial error and uncertainty, the development of ontologies as an aid to data fusion, and the development of formal methods for spatial reasoning and analysis, with applications in forestry, agriculture, geology, parks and hydrography.

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CANADA RESEARCH CHAIR

In 1999, Dr. Edwards became Associate Scientific Director and two years later Scientific Director of the GEOIDE Network of Centres of Excellence, a pan-Canadian research network with an annual budget in excess of 3 million $. In 2001, he was also awarded one of the first senior Canada Research Chairs, focussed on his area of expertise developed over the course of two decades, that of Cognitive Geomatics. The research focus of the Chair, which was renewed for a second 7 year mandate in 2008, eventually broadened to include applications to rehabilitation (health) and the arts (performance and installation arts primarily). Much of the work on the relation between the sciences and the arts was carried out in collaboration with Marie Louise Bourbeau, a lyrical singer with a deep and profound interest in the ways the arts and the sciences could be brought together. Furthermore, an emerging focus on research at the intersection between the sciences and the arts led to a sustained interest in contemporary philosophy (particularly the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and, eventually, Gilbert Simondon and Peter Sloterdijk) in order to find a unifying theoretical framework. 

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FASHION DESIGN

In 2010, Dr. Edwards launched a fashion design company called "gdotmoda" and developed and brought to market an unusual "transformable" dress of his own design, the gzip dress. In 2012, the company was restructured and became Vêtements Transforma, and in 2015, a second collection of transformable fashion corsets was launched, the Infinity Corsets. He is also currently at work (2020) developing several new collections, related to his diverse writing projects.

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EMERGENCE AS A WRITER

In 2012, Dr. Edwards developed the concept for the Ido Chronicles and a lot of the background material that forms the Ido Compendium, inspired by more than 10 years of gestation. By 2021, the Chronicles, originally planned as a 2500 page opus, had been expanded to 3000 pages of which 90% was complete in at least first draft, and two of the 15-book cycle were near publication-ready. In addition, four additional and complementary manuscripts were completed between 2015 and 2017, out of a total of six planned novels. In 2018, Dr. Edwards began writing the first two volumes of a new trilogy called the White Shadow Trilogy, this time a combination of historical and contemporary fiction, that had been in the planning stages for over five years. The first of these volumes, called Goodness in Small Doses, is being finalized for publication. The second, called Incarnations of Evil, exists in manuscript form and a third volume, called These White Shadows, is also under development.

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FULL TIME WRITING

In 2019, Dr. Edwards retired from his university position in order to take up full time writing. He continues to work on several research projects, however, and in January 2020 he took a position as part time consultant for Envisioning Labs, an innovation company whose headquarters is in Vancouver. The first volume of his 15-book science fiction saga, Plenum : The First Book of Deo, is slated to be published in May of 2022, and a second volume, Messioph : The First Book of Ido, is currently being finalized for publication for late 2022. He is also preparing a third volume, Pinnacle : The First Book of Eng, for publication in 2023. He has written a contemporary novel called River of Sighs about gender fluidity in Quebec, and is at work on a thriller whose working title is Splicer.