Dr. Yuan is an Ashbel Smith Professor of Geospatial Information Science in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). Before she joined UTD in August 2014, she was Brandt Professor and Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she started her academic career as an assistant professor of Geography in 1994. Her primary research contributes to GIScience advances in the representations and analytics of geographic dynamics to knowledge discovery. Over the last 20 years, her research has developed new approaches to conceptualizing and using space and time to organize, integrate, and reason geographic information to advance the understanding of activities, events, and processes in the physical, human, and socio-ecological environments. Her publications extend space-time data models and analytical methods for environmental, ecological, and social problems, such as wildfire risk, tornado hazards, air pollution, species distributions, eco-system modeling, trophic dynamics, infectious disease, hazardous waste transport, historical narratives, social events, emergency responses, and the effects of environmental complexity on spatial cognitive impairments.

In her capacity as the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS), she established the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible) requirement for sharing data and codes used in IJGIS publications. She served as the Chair of the AAG GIS specialty group (2002-2003), UCGIS president (2011-2012), and CaGIS president (2019-2020) and on the National Academy of Science’s Mapping Science committee (2009-2014), National Research Council’s Future Workforce for Geospatial Intelligence (2010-2012), the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (2016-2021), Intelligence Foundation (2018-2021), the NOAA Science Advisory Board’s Environmental Information and Services Working Group (2015-2022), the academic committee of the U.S. Geospatial the scientific advisory committee of the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.