Geospatial Software Institute Conceptualization Project selects Sixteen Geospatial Fellows

The Geospatial Software Institute (GSI) conceptualization project is pleased to announce the selection of sixteen Geospatial Fellows. Representing fourteen fellowship projects, these fellows will engage diverse science communities across the US to contribute to advancing COVID-19 research and education through the use of geospatial software and data. Each fellowship project is provided with seed funding as well as technical and cyberinfrastructure support from the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies (CyberGIS Center) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  

 The GSI conceptualization project is a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project for establishing a long-term hub of excellence in geospatial software infrastructure that can serve diverse research and education communities by creating bridges across science domains. Through these fellowships the GSI conceptualization project hopes to advance the following two significant goals: 1) enable researchers and educators to harness geospatial software and data at scale, in reproducible and transparent ways; and 2) increase the nation’s workforce capability and capacity to utilize geospatial big data and software for knowledge discovery. These fellowship projects will simultaneously play a crucial role in advancing timely research addressing the inherently interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of COVID-19 and the spatial contexts at play in its spread and impacts.

 The fellowship projects have ambitious goals including:

• Making geospatial research more reproducible and replicable;
• Developing new methods, including analysis, simulation, and modeling, to study COVID-19 related phenomenon;
• Understanding the societal impacts of COVID-19 on different communities;
• Assessing the spatial and social disparities of COVID-19 among vulnerable populations.

Out of forty fellowship projects were received in response to the call for proposals, fourteen fellowship projects headed by sixteen Geospatial Fellows were selected. The fellowship projects selected are diverse yet complementary in terms of their areas of study. The fellows themselves represent a diverse group in terms of ethnic and professional background as well as the size and locations of institutions they represent.

 “These fellowship grants will help position the GSI conceptualization project for success by establishing processes for enabling reproducible and replicable geospatial research and developing educational materials for use by the larger geospatial software community thereby helping the development of the national workforce,” said Project Manager Anand Padmanabhan.  

Here is a complete list of fellowship projects:

1. Peter Kedron and Joseph Holler. Working with Students to Reproduce COVID-19 Research to Establish the Credibility of Findings and Accelerate Policymaker Adoption
2. Clio Andris. Spatial Social Network (SSN) Contact Tracing Software Development and Application to the Fire Department of New York City
3. Xun Shi. A bottom-up approach to epidemic modeling
4. Song Gao. Geospatial Modeling of COVID-19 Spread Using Human Mobility Big Data and Deep Learning
5. Naomi Lazarus. Examining the Causal Effects of Age and Underlying Conditions on COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality
6. Xiang Chen. Compliance and containment: Meso-scale modeling and monitoring of COVID-19
7. Jayajit Chakraborty. Spatial and Social Disparities in Exposure to COVID-19 for People with Disabilities
8. Andrew Greenlee. An Analytical Framework for Post-Eviction Residential Location Outcomes in New York City: Implications for COVID Recovery
9. Ruby Mendenhall. Youth Citizen (Community) Scientists Mapping the Social, Economic and Environmental Impacts of COVID-19
10. Daniel Goldberg. COVID-19 Spatial Accessibility
11. Kenan Li and John Wilson. Modeling Human Mobility Impacts on the Spread of the Covid-19 Pandemic
12. Daoqin Tong. A Transmutation of Food Access During the COVID-19 Pandemic and After
13. Daniel Block. Applications of CyberGIS in two Food Mapping Projects in Chicago and Suburban Cook County, Illinois
14. Ningchuan Xiao. Human mobility: Understanding the impact of COVID-19 and its social and economic contexts in Columbus, OH using traffic camera feeds