Mengxi Zhang (Vice president, Future Data Lab)
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Carilion School of Medicine at Virginia Tech
Mengxi Zhang, Ph.D., MPH, is an Assistant Professor, Carilion School of Medicine at Virginia Tech. She graduated from Tulane University with her Ph.D. in International Health and Development and Master Degree in Epidemiology. Prior to Tulane, she majored in Preventive Medicine in Capital Medical University. Her research focuses mainly on the well-being of immigrants and displaced persons, disparities in health and healthcare resources among underrepresented populations, and the effectiveness of human mobility on the changes of health status.
Xiao Huang (Chair, Research Group)
Affiliation: Department of Enviromental Science, Emory Univeristy
Dr. Huang’s research primarily focuses on human-environment interaction, computational social sciences, vulnerability and resilience, urban informatics, disaster mapping and mitigation, GeoAI and deep learning, and disaster remote sensing. Different from traditional geospatial analysis, his research takes advantage of rapidly growing data availability through the utilization of emerging, innovative data sources and the development of advanced geospatial analytical techniques to address existing/future challenges in disaster studies (e.g., real-time monitoring, assessment, and mitigation) and human society (e.g., human behaviors, vulnerability, and inequity) from Big Data and spatiotemporal perspectives. He built an academic career integrating his research and wide‐reaching public service while engaging with communities, particularly socially disadvantaged communities.
Siqin Wang (Associate chair, Research Group)
Affiliation: Associate Professor of Spatial Sciences, Spatial Science Institute, University of Southern California
Siqin (Sisi) Wang, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Spatial Sciences with the Spatial Sciences Institute in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Wang’s research interests are in GIScience, spatiotemporal big data analytics, computational social science, digital health geography, human-centered GeoAI, human mobility and migration, smart cities and human-climate interactions and she has published extensively in these areas. Her co-first author 2021 paper on human mobility and COVID-19 transmission received the 2022 Best Paper Award and Most Downloaded Paper from the Annals of GIS in 2023.
Her professional roles include service as the Associated Chair for the Spatial Data Lab affiliated with Harvard University and as Vice Chair of the Young Scientist Innovation Network for Digital Earth of the International Society for Digital Earth.
Prior to joining the USC Spatial Sciences Institute, Dr. Wang was an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, and an Honorary Lecturer/Research Fellow with the University of Queensland, Australia. From April 2022 to July 2023, she also was a JSPS Research Fellow with the University of Tokyo, Japan, researching healthcare access and social vulnerability in the post-COVID Japan.
Members of Research Group:
Tao Hu
Affiliation: Department of Geography, Oklahoma State University
Dr. Tao Hu is an Assistant Professor in Department of Geography at Oklahoma State University. Before joining OSU, he worked as a postdoc research fellow in the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and the Department of Geography at Kent State University. His research interests include geospatial big data analysis (i.e., social media), health geography, human mobility, and crime geography. Dr. Hu’s current research aims to build an open data repository for sharing public health-related data, to facilitate interdisciplinary research, education, and training. In addition, his research applies GeoAI (Geospatial Artificial Intelligence) analytics to study the post-pandemic human mobility, environmental, and mental health topics. Dr. Hu has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles with 2 ESI Highly Cited papers (top 1%) in geoscience.
Zhenlong Li
Affiliation: Department of Geography, University of South Carolina
Dr. Zhenlong Li is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina (USC), where he established and leads the Geoinformation and Big Data Research Laboratory (GIBD). He received B.S. degree (2006) in Geographic Information Science from Wuhan University, and Ph.D. (2015, with distinction) in Geography and Geoinformation Sciences from George Mason University. Dr. Li is recognized as a Breakthrough Star by USC in 2020 and listed as one of the Geospatial World 50 Rising Stars by the Geospatial Media and Communications in 2021. He is also a Peter and Bonnie McCausland Faculty Fellow (2020-2023) at the USC College of Arts and Sciences.
Lingbo Liu
Affiliation: Post-doctoral research fellow, Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University
Lingbo Liu is a post-doctoral research fellow at the CGA. He was a lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning, School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, and a Visiting Scholar at the CGA of Harvard University. His research field focuses on healthy cities, using multi-source data and spatial quantitative models to capture the spatiotemporal features of urban system, analyze the coupling mechanism of the space-human system, and provide decision support for public policy, urban planning and design. His research highlights the characteristics of the entropy models in analyzing urban complex systems and explores a potential systematic path of Social Physics 2.0. Since 2019, as one of the core members, he has participated in the workflow-based spatial analysis platform project initiated by the CGA.
Xiaokang Fu
Affiliation: Post-doctoral research fellow, Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University
iaokang Fu is a postdoctoral fellow at the CGA. He was a postdoctoral researcher in State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, and a Visiting Fellow at the CGA. His research interests include Geostatistics and Geoinformatics (GIS), Urban Computing, Social Media Data Mining, Emergency Response, and healthy cities. Since 2020, as one of the core members, he has participated in the workflow-based spatial analysis platform project and COVID-19 quick response project initiated by the CGA.