2026 Speakers

Shaowen Wang

Professor and Associate Dean, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Wang is a professor in the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science and the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He also serves as associate dean for Natural and Mathematical Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and as a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at UIUC. He is the founding director of UIUC’s CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies and leads the national Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) funded by the National Science Foundation.

He previously served as Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science (2017-2023) and as Associate Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for CyberGIS (2010-2017). He was a Visiting Scholar at Lund University (2006) and Harvard University (2023). He served as President of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) from 2016 to 2017 and as a member of the National Academies’ Board on Earth Sciences and Resources from 2015 to 2020. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association of Geographers, and UCGIS. He received a B.S. in computer engineering from Tianjin University, an M.S. in geography from Peking University, and an M.S. of computer science and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Iowa.

His research focuses on advancing cyberGIS, geospatial data science, and spatial artificial intelligence to develop scalable solutions for complex geospatial problems and sustainability challenges.