Dr. Shaowen Wang is awarded University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Fellow status in recognition of his advancement of research, education, and transdisciplinary community building. At the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign he is a professor of geography and geographic information science (primary), computer science, and urban and regional planning, Associate Dean for Life and Physical Sciences, a Senior Faculty Fellow with the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, founding Director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, and a former Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science.

Dr. Wang developed and fundamentally advanced cyberGIS as an accessible exploitation of high-performance computing (HPC) in the environmental and geospatial sciences. One of his most significant early contributions was in showing how the established methods and practices of conventional geospatial computing could be adapted and made workable within heterogeneous environments of HPC. As a result, it became possible to ask research questions about much more complex social and environmental systems spanning various spatial and temporal scales through making geospatial analysis and modeling computationally scalable.

Although much of this work focuses on cyberGIS, the breadth of Dr. Wang’s interests is broad ranging. His scholarship has ranged from large-scale flood inundation mapping and prediction of crop yields under climate change to modeling human activity dynamics and spatial accessibility to healthcare resources. One of the most significant papers, in the Annals of the AAG, “A CyberGIS Framework for the Synthesis of Cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and Spatial Analysis,” represents his early vision for cyberGIS. He has both developed the basic frameworks and spatial methodologies, as well as applied these theories and methods in myriad application areas. Shaowen has received dozens of major research grants from federal agencies including NSF, DOE, NASA, NIH, NOAA, USDA, and USGS. He currently leads the NSF Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE). This extraordinary grant record clearly demonstrates the transformative nature of his research as evaluated by his national peers.

Dr. Wang has also shown great leadership in building an interdisciplinary network and community of scientists who benefit from cyberGIS and cyberinfrastructure advances. He has strongly engaged with diverse domain sciences, supporting their use of cyberGIS tools, listening intently to their computational needs, bringing them together for workshops and discussions, and developing training modules for young scholars from across the environmental and geospatial sciences. He and his team have developed outstanding examples of harnessing cyberGIS and cyberinfrastructure in areas that range from continental scale hydrology to smart city sensor networks. His approach has at all times remained rigorously scientific.

Among contributions to his professional discipline, he has served as President of UCGIS, AAG Cyberinfrastructure Specialty Group Chair, and on advisory boards of Google, NAS, and NSF, to name just a few. He is a Fellow of AAAS and AAG. Shaowen’s impact has been both deep and extremely broad. UCGIS is very pleased to name Dr. Shaowen Wang as a UCGIS Fellow.