Funded Projects

This project is funded by Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) Program which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance.

The geospatial services industry is a profitable and rapidly growing field; however, employers find it difficult to hire scientists with expertise in both geography and computer science. The limited availability of training opportunities in both computer science and geography has created a shortage of workers with the necessary knowledge and skill sets for those jobs. Through a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership (RPP), The Association of American Geographers (AAG), in collaboration with Texas State University, the University of California-Riverside, San Diego State University, the California Geographic Alliance, Sweetwater Union High School District, and San Diego Mesa College, will create an inclusive high school to college curriculum pathway that bridges concepts in computer science and geography. This RPP will support the development of a curriculum that is conceptually rigorous, inclusive, and culturally relevant. It will also produce a replicable approach for teaching geocomputation that is accessible and motivational for all learners.

Nationally, narratives of opioid overdose as a predominantly White suburban crisis tell only a partial story, overshadowing the importance of local geosocial contexts in producing overdose disparities in marginalized and underserved communities. The goal of this project is to develop an innovative Ethno-Geographic Information System (EGIS) combining ethnography with spatial analytics to characterize opioid overdose and guide resource allocation and research to address overdose disparities in underserved communities. Our research will provide an innovative new method, EGIS, to serve as a foundation for developing and testing community-level interventions to reduce overdose incidence and mortality in subsequent R01 grant proposals, and will provide a new tool for use by communities around the country to refine and optimally target efforts to reduce opioid overdose disparities.

This project enhances the geosnap software package to assist research on the relationship between neighborhoods and educational outcomes. Its goal is to improve the analytical capacity of educational researchers supporting Black, Latino, and low-income students by making advanced spatial methods easier to adopt.

This project develops a new body of spatial analytic methods for data intensive research in the social and behavioral sciences. Through an interdisciplinary team of geographic information scientists, public policy scholars, and computer scientists, this project provides researchers with the next generation of scalable, high performance spatial analytical techniques. The research targets existing challenges that have hindered the more extensive and intensive utilization of geospatial data from the US Census, American Community Survey, and social media through a combination of new computational algorithms for regionalization, new approaches to computational inference, and use of scalable spatial and spatiotemporal data management techniques.

This research project will comparatively analyze the dynamics of regional inequality in the United States and China using recent developments in geographic information science. Because the investigators will focus on core-periphery structure, place mobility, and scalar effects, this project will significantly improve basic understanding of spatial inequality. This project will advance knowledge about the dynamics of regional income inequality in a number of different ways. It will provide a systematic study of the multi-scalar nature of regional inequality, thereby providing a clearer picture of the dynamics of regional inequality and its relationship to scale. It will provide new insights about place mobility and about the core-periphery structure in regional development, and it will provide new perspectives regarding the role of geography in regional inequality. Project findings should prove valuable to domestic and international organizations, such as non-profit organizations and the U.S. and Chinese governments, giving them improved understanding of inequality and facilitating the development of more informed policies that address development issues in equitable ways.