About
About
Welcome to the home of geography at Harvard! We aim to help grow and sustain spatial research and teaching across campus and across disciplines through research, data, infrastructure, and training.
CGA’s History
The Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) was established in 2006 to support research and teaching across all disciplines in the University as they relate to spatial data, methods, technologies, and training. CGA’s founder and inaugural Faculty Director was Peter Bol, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. From 2014–2020, the CGA was led by Jason Ur, Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology. Our longtime Executive Director was Wendy Guan, who retired in 2025. Learn more about our history in this 9 minute video made in 2023.
Since 2018, the CGA has been housed within the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), leveraging synergies and common goals in the pursuit of research, data infrastructure, technological advancements, and methodological innovation in service to resolving grand societal challenges using spatial science.
Who We Are
CGA is home to spatial researchers and data scientists, as well as experts in GIS services, datasets, and software, AI, geographic data science and big data. Along with our permanent research and support staff, we have several post-doctoral researchers and frequently host visiting PhD students and researchers. CGA’s current Executive Director is Dr. Rachel Franklin and the Chair of our Faculty Advisory Group is Dr. Subu Subramanian, Professor of Population Health and Geography at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Learn More About CGA
CGA works across the university to strengthen Harvard’s spatial analytic capacity, including supporting infrastructure and services, platform development, scholarly research, and GIS and geographic data science teaching at all levels.
Combining sponsored research, data infrastructure development, software and hardware provision, consultation services, and technical training, the Center enables a diverse range of research and teaching involving spatial analysis. For example, our GIS support spans general cartography and mapping, geographic data collection, big data processing and “GeoAI”, as well as spatial visualization, web mapping, and web services. As part of its mission, CGA also actively promotes spatial thinking and capacity building through teaching, training workshops, and course support.
Come to CGA for:
- Individual research project consulting
- Research collaboration including proposal development
- Support with software development, high-performance research computing / cloud computing, AI, machine learning, spatial big data and data science
- Access to hardware, software, data, and licenses
- Training programs and technical workshops
- Curriculum support for Harvard courses
- Monthly seminars and and an annual conference on GIS topics
- Tools for GIS applications and platforms for online collaborative research
Get Involved
- Contact us with specific questions or general inquiries
- Sign up for our Newsletter and Events mailing list and receive our monthly newsletter and notifications of upcoming events