Dr. Yi-Fu Tuan was born on December 5th, 1930 in Tientsin, China. In 1951 he followed his father who was a diplomat to the United States to live. Before his family Yi-Fu was educated in China, The Philippines, and Australia. In 1951, Yi-Fu received a bachelor's degree from Oxford University and then pursued a master's degree, which he obtained in 1955. Receiving a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkley in 1957, he went on to teach as an instructor of Geography at Indiana University at Bloomington, University of Chicago in 1958, and then moved to the University of New Mexico in 1959 where he initially began to write about the physical landscapes of the southwest. Yi-Fu began his career in Arizona as a geomorphologist, and wrote his dissertation on desert landforms. He said most geographers of his generation and earlier began their careers in the physical side of the discipline. Physical geography was considered the basis of all geography, and to Yi-Fu, physical geography teaches the art of detailed and systematic observation, which is useful in humanistic geography. In 1965, Tuan moved to Ontario, Canada to become the associate professor of Geography at the University of Toronto. Two years later, he moved to the University of Minnesota where he had been award the Guggenheim Fellowship award and the "meritous contribution to geography" award by the Association of American Geographers in 1973. After teaching for 16 years at the University of Minnesota, Tuan left in 1984 to become a professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The American Geographical Association gave the Cullum Geographical Medal to Yi-Fu Tuan in 1987 while he was still working at the University of Wisconsin.
             Yi-Fu is also an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a highly respected member of the AAG, the Association for Asian Studies, the American Geographical Societ
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