Mr. Flynn is the Executive Secretary for Foreign Names of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and serves as the Geographer of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, positions he assumed in 1993.

He holds the degrees of Master of Arts (1977) and Bachelor of Arts (1975) in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Virginia, and has also studied at Indiana University and as an exchange student at Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University, Russia).  Through the Defense Mapping Agency’s Long-Term Full-Time Training Program, he completed the graduate-level program in Geodetic Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, with a concentration in estimation theory (1985).  Before joining the Defense Mapping Agency in 1979 as a geographic names and boundary analyst, he was an Instructor of Russian Language at the University of Virginia, and a free-lance translator.

He has lectured on geographic names database design and national names standardization at the National Bureau of Surveying and Mapping in Beijing, China, at the Main Administration for Geodesy, Cartography, and Cadastre in Kiev, Ukraine, and at the National Land Board in Riga, Latvia.  He is a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), and acts as UNGEGN liaison with the International Hydrographic Organization.  Within UNGEGN, he convenes the Working Group on Toponymic Data Files and Gazetteers.  Mr. Flynn is Vice-Chairman of the Geographic Names Working Group within the Commission on Cartography of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH), and is an instructor in the annual PAIGH course on applied toponymy, having taught courses on geographic names in Bolivia, Honduras, Paraguay, and Peru.  He is a member of the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s Subcommittee on International Boundary and Sovereignty Data.

His most recent publication is “Unicode in Geographic Data Bases,” issued in the proceedings of the 13th International Unicode Conference, September 1998.