Biography
Shaowen Wang 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). He also holds affiliate faculty appointments in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and the School of Information Sciences. At UIUC, he serves as Associate Dean for Life and Physical Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and is a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation. He directs UIUC’s CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies and leads the national Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) funded by the National Science Foundation. He was a Visiting Scholar at Lund University (2006) and Harvard University (2023). His research focuses on advancing cyberGIS and geospatial data science for scalable solutions to complex geospatial problems and sustainability challenges. He previously served as President of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) from 2016 to 2017 and as a member of the National Academies’ Board on Earth Sciences and Resources from 2015 to 2020. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Association of Geographers (AAG), and UCGIS.
Education
- PhD, Geography, the University of Iowa
- Master of Computer Science, the University of Iowa
- MS, Geography, Peking University
- BS, Computer Engineering, Tianjin University
Courses Taught
- Coursera: Getting Started with CyberGIS
- GGIS 595 - Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies
- GGIS 480 - Principles of GIS
- GGIS 479 - Advanced GIS
- GGIS 407 - Foundations of CyberGIS and Geospatial Data Science
- GGIS 379 - Introduction to GIS
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Professor, Geography and Geographic Information Science
Professor, School of Information Sciences
Senior Faculty Fellow, New Frontiers Initiative, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation
Affiliate, Center for Social & Behavioral Science
Professor, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science
External Links
Recent Publications
Choi, Y. D., Maghami, I., Goodall, J. L., Band, L., Nassar, A., Lin, L., Saby, L., Li, Z., Wang, S., Calloway, C., Yi, H., Seul, M., Ames, D. P., & Tarboton, D. G. (2025). Toward reproducible and interoperable environmental modeling: Integration of HydroShare with server-side methods for exposing large-extent spatial datasets to models. Environmental Modelling and Software, 183, Article 106239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2024.106239
Lyu, F., Yang, Z., Diao, C., & Wang, S. (2025). Multistream STGAN: A Spatiotemporal Image Fusion Model With Improved Temporal Transferability. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 18, 1562-1576. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2024.3506879
Michels, A., Park, J., Kang, J. Y., & Wang, S. (2025). An Areal Approach to Spatial Accessibility Analysis. Geographical Analysis, 57(2), 233-269. https://doi.org/10.1111/gean.12415
Han, S. Y., Kim, J. S., Jiang, Y., Kang, J. Y., Park, J., Han, C., Michels, A., & Wang, S. (2024). CyberGIS-Vis for Democratizing Access to Scalable Spatiotemporal Geovisual Analytics: A Case Study of COVID-19. In J.-S. Kim, T. Anderson, M. Lau, A. Roess, & A. Zufle (Eds.), SPATIALEPI 2024 - Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Computing for Epidemiology (pp. 19-22). (SPATIALEPI 2024 - Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Spatial Computing for Epidemiology). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3681777.3698474
Hu, W., Jin, B., Jiang, M., Zhou, S., Wang, Z., Han, J., & Wang, S. (2024). Geospatial Topological Relation Extraction from Text with Knowledge Augmentation. In S. Shekhar, V. Papalexakis, J. Gao, Z. Jiang, & M. Riondato (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2024 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2024 (pp. 472-480). Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Publications. https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611978032.55