Shaowen Wang

Shaowen Wang is a geographic information scientist, geographer, and computer scientist. He 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). Wang's research focuses on integrating geographic information systems and spatial analysis with high-performance computing to address complex geospatial problems and sustainability challenges, particularly through the development of CyberGIS (cyber geographic information science and systems). Wang was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2021 and a Fellow of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in 2022. and is the Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE).

Early life and education Wang was born in 1973 and raised in the northern region of Shanxi Province, China. He attended Tianjin University, where he received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering in 1995. He subsequently earned a Master of Science in geography from Peking University in 1998. Wang then moved to the United States for graduate studies at the University of Iowa, completing a Master of Computer Science in 2002 and a Ph.D. in geography in 2004. His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Marc P. Armstrong , focused on computational geography.

Research and career Wang joined the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2007. Between 2010 and 2017, Wang was the associate director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for CyberGIS. During that time, he led the development of ROGER, a supercomputer optimized for geospatial data-intensive sciences. Wang served as Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at UIUC from 2017 to 2023. He holds the position of Associate Dean for Natural and Mathematical Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at UIUC.

As principal investigator, Wang has directed over $30 million research awards and grants. From 2015 to 2020, Wang was a member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Honors and awards 2024: Fellow, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS)

2022: Fellow, American Association of Geographers (AAG)

2022: AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors

2021: Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

2021: Getis-Ord Lecture in Spatial Analysis, the 60th Anniversary Meeting of the Western Regional Science Association

2019: Borchert Lecture, the University of Minnesota

2009: NSF CAREER Award

Selected publications Wang has published over 200 peer-reviewed works.