NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Washington DC, June 18, 2009

Press Information
Diansheng Guo
e-mail:  guod@sc.edu

UCGIS Board Member Receives NSF CAREER Award

Shaowen Wang, serving on the UCGIS Board of Directors, has recently been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to study spatially oriented theories and methods for enabling computationally intensive spatial analysis and modeling to establish a next-generation Geographic Information Systems (GIS) framework.

Wang is an assistant professor of geography, senior research scientist of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the founding director of the CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory (CIGI, www.cigi.uiuc.edu) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and runs the NSF TeraGrid GIScience Gateway (www.gisolve.org). The award, totaling $470,000 for five years, funds the project: "CAREER: Formalizing and Resolving Computational Intensity of Spatial Analysis to Establish a Cyber-GIS Framework." Wang’s CAREER project is motivated by enormous needs to resolve computational challenges in cutting-edge geographic discovery. The project is designed to drastically transform GIS technologies and applications based on cyberinfrastructure (arguably the most sophisticated modern infrastructure that human beings have ever planned or created) to support transparent access to massive geographically distributed computational resources and services.

GIS have been around for several decades, gaining tremendous popularity and usage driven by diverse needs related to geography and enabled by personal computers and Internet technologies,” said Wang. “However, existing GIS solutions are ill-suited to massive geographic data handling and collaborative geospatial problem solving and decision making that become increasingly indispensible in many fields. Meanwhile, emerging cyberinfrastructure is being developed to revolutionize science and engineering practices by meeting computational needs in an infrastructure fashion and facilitating collaborative scientific problem solving. Therefore, given the mounting computational challenges from GIS and related applications, I believe that the benefits, for GIS-related disciplines as well as our entire society, are tremendous to develop the Cyber-GIS for the synthesis of cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis and modeling. Cyber-GIS promise to lead to wide scientific breakthroughs and broad societal impacts.

Wang’s research and teaching interests are in the general areas of computational geography, cyberinfrastructure, geographic information science, and geographic problem solving. He is trained as both a geographer and computer scientist,  received his BS in computer engineering from Tianjin University, China in 1995; MS in geography from Peking University, China in 1998; MS in computer science and Ph.D. in geography from the University of Iowa in 2002 and 2004 respectively.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the missions of their organizations. The award description states the activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.

For more information, see http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0846655