Shaowen Wang

Shaowen Wang is a Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science; and an Affiliate Professor of the Department of Computer Science, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is a Faculty Fellow of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at UIUC. He has served as Founding Director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies at UIUC since 2013, and as Principal Investigator (PI) and Director of the NSF Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) since 2021. He also served as Associate Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for CyberGIS from 2010 to 2017. His research and teaching interests include geographic information science and systems (GIS), advanced cyberinfrastructure and cyberGIS, complex social and environmental problems, computational and data sciences, geospatial science and technology, high-performance and distributed computing, and spatial analysis and modeling. He has received research funding from several U.S. federal and state agencies (e.g., CDC, DOE, Illinois EPA, NASA, NIH, NSF, USDA, and USGS) and industry, and served as PI of more than $30 million competitive research grants. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed papers & reports and edited or co-edited several books and proceedings. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2009. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Fellow of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). He received the 2022 AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors. He served as President of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science from 2016 to 2017, and as a member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine from 2015 to 2020. He received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Tianjin University, an M.S. in Geography from Peking University, and a Master of Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Iowa.