SHORT BIO
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 has served as Founding Director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies at UIUC since 2013. He served as Associate Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for CyberGIS from 2010 to 2017. He was a visiting scholar at Lund University sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2006, and a NCSA Fellow in 2007. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2009. He was named a Helen Corley Petit Scholar for 2011-12, Centennial Scholar for 2013-16, and Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar for 2018-21 by UIUC’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has given more than 100 invited talks, including for example the Borchert Lecture at the University of Minnesota in 2019 and the Getis-Ord Lecture in 2020 at the 60th Anniversary Meeting of the Western Regional Science Association.
Wang’s research interests include geographic information science and systems (GIS), advanced cyberinfrastructure and cyberGIS, complex environmental and geospatial problems, computational and data sciences, high-performance and distributed computing, and spatial analysis and modeling. He has received research funding from several U.S. federal agencies (e.g., CDC, DOE, EPA, NASA, NIH, NSF, USDA, and USGS) and industry; and served as Principal Investigator (PI) for more than $30 million competitive research grants, and co-PI and investigator for contributing to sponsored research supported with tens of millions of U.S. dollars. He currently serves as the PI and Director of a 5-year, $15 million project entitled, “Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE)”, funded by the NSF’s Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Institute program to push the boundaries of data-intensive research in geospatial and sustainability sciences. He has authored or co-authored more than 160 peer-reviewed papers including articles in more than 40 journals; and edited or co-edited several books and proceedings.
Wang has served as an Action Editor of GeoInformatica, Associate Editor of SoftwareX, and guest editor or editorial board member for multiple other journals. He served on the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Board of Directors from 2009 to 2012, and as President of UCGIS from 2016 to 2017. He served as a member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine from 2015 to 2020, and as a member of the advisory board of the NSF Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment program from 2016 to 2018. He received a BS (1995) in Computer Engineering from Tianjin University, an MS (1998) in Geography from Peking University, and a Master of Computer Science (2002) and a PhD (2004) in Geography from the University of Iowa. He has advised more than 20 PhD/MA/MS students and more than 20 postdoctoral fellows, and many of his advisees are now holding positions at major research universities, premier research and development laboratories, and major companies related to geography, GIS, and geospatial science and technology.
