Donna Peuquet joined the Penn State Depatment of Geography in 1986 after several years at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Before then, she worked at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va. She earned her doctorate degree in geography with emphasis in (what is now known as) geographic information science at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
While no longer teaching after retirement in 2017, she remains active with emerita status. Her research interests are in the areas of geographic knowledge representation, knowledge discovery, spatio-temporal data models, spatial cognition, AI approaches to knowledge representation, and geocomputation. Since the early 1990s, work has centered on the representation of time and temporal dynamics, including database, visual and cognitive representation, and how these interrelate, arguing that the human user and the computer must be viewed as components of a single system. Her book, Representations of Space and Time, written with the help of a Fullbright Fellowship, is an in-depth exploration of this integrated perspective. She was named a Fellow of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) in 2016.