Mei-Po Kwan, professor of geography and geographic information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been named a fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Kwan was one of 178 scholars, artists, and scientists selected to receive a 2016 Guggenheim fellowship. Guggenheim Fellows are chosen from about 3,000 highly accomplished applicants “on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.” Guggenheim Fellows “represent the best of the best.”
Kwan’s selection reflects her ground-breaking contributions to the discipline of geography in fields spanning environmental health, sustainable cities, human mobility, socio-economic issues in cities, and GIScience. As noted in a recent award citation: “One of the defining characteristics of her research is that it transcends and eschews boundaries” both within geography and beyond.
Kwan plans to use the Guggenheim fellowship to deepen our understanding of the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP) and to conceive possible methods for mitigating the problem in social science and health research. More information about Kwan’s Guggenheim fellowship is available at: http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/mei-po-kwan/.
Kwan earned her Ph.D. in geography from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was recognized in 2009 as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2011, she received the Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the Association of American Geographers. For more information about Mei-Po’s work, see the following citation for her recent 2016 E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award from the American Association of Geographers: http://news.aag.org/2016/03/2016-miller-award/.
"Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $334 million in fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, many of whom have also received Nobel prizes, Pulitzer prizes, Fields medals and other internationally recognized honors."