Military

After earning his master's degree from the University of Washington, Dacey served for two years in the Army Map Service, a cartographic agency that was under the United States Army Corps of Engineers.^[1] In the Army Map Service, he was stationed in Japan. He was discharged from the military in 1958.^[1]

Academic

After obtaining his Ph.D., Dacey's first academic position was as assistant professor of regional science at the University of Pennsylvania from 1960 to 1964.^[1][3] Here, he and fellow University of Washington student Duane Marble both worked under Walter Isard.^[5] In 1994 he moved to the Northwestern University department of geography, which he served as department chair of from 1976 to 1982.^[3] In 1978, Dacey established the Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences (MMSS) at Northwestern to help students that had strong quantitative skills, but were uninterested in physical sciences.^[2][3] In 1987, Dacey became an associate dean in the Weinberg College at Northwestern, and later a senior associate dean in 1993.^[3]

Publications and research

Darcey published several books, technical documents, and peer-reviewed journals during his academic career that were influential to establishing quantitative geography within the mainstream of geography discipline.^[3][4] Dacey's early research on spatial statistics and Geographic information systems has been described as foundational to the discipline today.^[6][7] Darcey's work is cited by Artur Getis as underpinning the origin of the concept of spatial autocorrelation, and is credited as the first geographer to cite P. A. P. Moran, and Roy C. Geary.^[5] His work in early spatial statistics involving spatial autocorrelation was limited by computer technology at the time, and therefore was unable to be confirmed until later.^[1]

In the 1964 foreword to Darcey's paper Imperfections in the Uniform Plane, geographer John Nystuen stated:

"It must be clear to the reader from the contents of this paper that Michael Dacey has indeed traveled over much ground. He has previously developed many of the results needed in this study. Many of his solutions and applications are ingenious. He exhibits an understanding of the theoretical implications of his work. He has a wide knowledge of the literature on probability and is able to adopt simulation methods and computer technology to his purpose. All he lacks is someone to talk to."

— John Nystuen, Foreword to "Imperfections in the Uniform Plane", ^[7]

His 1965 technical report for the Office of Naval Research Some Comments on Certain Technical Aspects of Geographic Information Systems, published with Duane Marble, is described by John Hessler, cartographic specialist at the Library of Congress, as "one of the most conceptually rich treatments of the foundations of Geographic Information Systems from these early years."^[6][3][8]