People

Dr. Rachel Franklin started as Executive Director of the CGA in March of 2025, bringing more than 20 years’ experience as an educator and researcher in GIS, spatial analysis, and quantitative methods. Her research interests are in the sources and impacts...

S V Subramanian is Professor of Population Health and Geography at Harvard University. He was the Founding Director of Graduate Studies for the interdisciplinary PhD program in Population Health Sciences at Harvard. He has published over 700 articles...

Jeff joined the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard in 2007 as a Senior GIS Specialist, and became the GIS Service Manager in 2016. He has experience working in the GIS industry as a technician, analyst, developer, manager, and educator. Jeff earned...

At CGA, Devika Jain leads the area of GeoAI, Spatial Data Science and Big Data using High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud Computing. She has led the development of impactful solutions, including TSGI (a UN-recognized spatial well-being metric), RINX...

Lingbo Liu is a Research Associate at the CGA, and a lecturer on geographic analysis at Department of Government. He was a CGA post-doctoral research fellow, and previously a lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning, School of Urban Design, Wuhan...

Zifu Wang, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), Harvard University, whose research lies at the intersection of Geographic Information Science (GIS), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and computational science...

Jaiany Rocha Trindade is a PhD candidate in Marketing at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at Harvard University. In 2025, she received the AMS Review–Sheth Foundation...

Professor Bol led the Harvard University-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research. He was named first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis when it was founded in 2005. As a leading advocate and user of...

Jason Ur is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Geographic Analysis in 2014-2020. He studies the origins and development of cities and empires in the Middle East and their landscape impacts, using...

Wendy Guan was the Executive Director of the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at Harvard University from 2014 until her retirement in February of 2025. Before that she was the Director of Research Services at Harvard CGA. Since 2013 Wendy also managed...

Peter Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He was the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning (2013-2018). Prof. Bol led Harvard’s university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching...

Doctor Berkman is an internationally-recognized social epidemiologist whose work focuses extensively on social and policy influences on health outcomes. As Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies her research focuses on...

Professor Blier is the co-creator of Africamap, a platform for visualizing, analyzing, and sharing maps and geographic datasets related to African studies. This project expanded into Worldmap, which now hosts research for over 20,000 people, mostly...

John Brownstein, Ph.D is Professor at Harvard Medical School, Chief Innovation Officer of Boston Children’s Hospital, and Director of the Computational Epidemiology Lab and the Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator at Boston Children’s. His work aims...

Marcia Castro is the Andelot Professor of Demography, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and director of the Brazil Studies Program of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American...

Ryan D. Enos specializes in American Politics, Political Psychology, and Race and Ethnic Politics. He studies political behavior and intergroup attitudes through laboratory and field experiments and spatial analysis. He directs the Working Group in...

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder. Professor Gates is a founder of the AfricaMap and WorldMap map platforms which support a range of map-based collaborations...

Andy Gordon directs the extensive Japan Disasters Archive and JapanMap, which preserve both real-time information related to the Sendai earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, as well as accounts of the aftermath. As an historian of Modern Japan, Gordon is...

Nicole is a Visiting Researcher at the CGA and was previously on the Oracle Spatial development team. She currently works for Apple. Nicole has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a M.S. in Geographic and Geodetic...

Scott Bell is a Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Saskatchewan and teaches GIS, Cartography, and human geography. He has expertise in advanced applications of GIS and GIS training for academic research. Scott holds an MA and PhD in...

Jan Kinne is a postdoc in the research area "Economics of Innovation and Business Dynamics" at the Center for European Economic Research. He studied geoinformatics at the University of Heidelberg and received his PhD from the University of Salzburg on the...

Josh is a senior research scientist at CGA working on hydrographic ontologies and semantic applications for the U.S. National Map as part of the new Spatiotemporal Innovation Center. He also serves as a coordinating architect and initiative manager for...

Bernd Resch is a Full Professor of Geo-social AI at IT:U and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis (USA). Bernd Resch did his PhD in the area of “Live Geography” (real-time monitoring of environmental geo-processes)...

Siqin (Sisi) Wang is an Associate Professor at Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California and a Visiting Scholar at Center of Geographic Analysis, Harvard University. Dr Wang is also affiliated to the Royal Melbourne Institute of...

Matthew W. Wilson, PhD, is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. He co-founded and co-directs the New Mappings Collaboratory which studies and...

Erin Abbott is a senior at the University of Chicago pursuing a major in Environmental and Urban Studies, minor in GIS, and pre-med. Following graduation, she will be heading to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as part of the FlexMed program...

Rafael Albuquerque is a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), specializing in data analysis and modeling in consumer behavior research. His research explores how different levels of e-WOM (electronic word-of...

Dorian Arifi is a PhD student at the University of Salzburg, holding an MSc in Data Science with a focus on Deep Learning and Database Management. He also earned a BSc in Economics from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, specializing in statistical...

Sarah Arnold is a recent graduate of DePaul University, with bachelor degrees in both Geography and Philosophy. She is currently with the CGA as an NSF Research Fellow and is interested in exploring projects that involve a dynamic production of knowledge...

Trevor Bloom is a senior at the University of Colorado Boulder pursuing a major in Environmental Studies with a minor in Geography. He is currently working as an NSF REU Student Research Fellow at the Center for Geographic analysis and is excited to be...

Aug. 2012 - Feb. 2018 Stacy came to Harvard in 2012 with work experience in consulting, the non-profit sector, and the arts. In the past she could be found guiding researchers through the Atlantic rainforest in Brazil, managing data for the remediation of...

Eamon is an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying Urban Geography and French, while also pursuing a minor in Sustainable Community Development. He is currently working at the Center for Geographic Analysis as an NSF REU Student...

Samantha Carr is pursuing a degree in Urban Systems at McGill University, concentrating in the fields of GIS, Urban Planning and Architecture. She is currently working with the Center for Geographic Analysis as an NSF REU Student Research Fellow and is...