• 2022-02-28 - PhD candidate Wataru Morioka (Advisor: Mei-Po Kwan) taught a class on GIS and mapping as part of University High School's annual Agora Days, where teachers and community members are invited to share their knowledge and present topics of general interest. Eight students joined Wataru's 4-day introductory...
  • 2022-02-17 - He consistently plucked the names of countries, Greek letters and obscure adverbs from his memory banks and came out on top in his first appearance, earning $10,500.
  • 2022-02-14 - Judith Keller is a visiting doctoral researcher in GGIS and member of the "Authority and Trust in American Culture, Society, History, and Politics" graduate program at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and the Geographies of North America working group at Heidelberg University, Germany. She visited New...
  • 2022-01-28 - Professors Murugesu Sivapalan and Shaowen Wang have been elected to the class of 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellows! They are among 14 University of Illinois faculty members chosen by their peers for the prestigious honor...
  • 2021-12-21 - Shaowen Wang, a 2022 recipient of the AAG’s Distinguished Scholarship Honors, has played a leading role in the development of cyber-based geographic information science (cyberGIS) as a transdisciplinary scientific approach that develops and integrates new computational methods, techniques, and instruments with geospatial knowledge, spatial analytics, and their applications in a...
  • 2021-12-09 - by Diana Yates, U of I News Bureau While climate change is the primary driver of permafrost degradation in Arctic Alaska, a new analysis of 70 years of data reveals that tundra fires are accelerating that decline, contributing disproportionately to a phenomenon known as “thermokarst,” the abrupt collapse of ice-rich permafrost as a result of thawing. Reported in the journal One Earth,...
  • 2021-11-19 - PhD candidate Nina Roberts (Advisor: David Wilson) sent these postcards from New Mexico, where she is conducting dissertation fieldwork. Her project is tentatively entitled "In Search of the 'Resilient' City: Balancing Economic Growth, Climate Change, and Climate Justice in the American Southwest." Taken on a rural highway in central New Mexico. This is a view of the windward...
  • 2021-11-17 - Congratulations to the GIS Day 2021 Virtual Student Poster Competition winners! You can explore the poster gallery (31 total posters) at GISDay.Illinois.edu and in the Gather.town virtual exhibition space.
  • 2021-10-11 - The department was honored to welcome Professor William A.V. Clark (PhD, 1964) back to campus last week to accept his 2020-21 Distinguished Alumnus Award. Clark is professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is truly an outstanding scholar of geography, earning the...
  • 2021-09-28 - A new national initiative to enable geospatial data-driven scientific discovery will create a $15-million institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to better understand the risks and impacts of climate change and disasters.
  • 2021-09-23 - Backed by a multi-million-dollar federal grant, a research team from three major universities will soon start working on a pioneering supercomputing system that allows scientists and engineers to align its processors, accelerators, memory, and other hardware components to best serve their needs.
  • 2021-09-12 - by Sandy Wong (PhD, 2017) and Matt Cohn Dr. Sara McLafferty has retired from the University of Illinois after a distinguished 20-year tenure. Sara joined the department as a full professor in 2001, served as associate head from 2004-2011, department head from 2012-2017, and director of undergraduate studies from 2019-2021. As head, Sara facilitated many important milestones for the...
  • 2021-08-30 - Professor Chunyuan Diao has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award for her project entitled “CAREER: Scalable Remote Sensing Computational Framework for Near-real-time Crop Characterization.” The CAREER Award is highly competitive and indicates a faculty member's potential to serve as an academic...
  • 2021-05-21 - Congratulations to all of our Fall 2020, Spring 2021, and Summer 2021 bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree earners. Several graduates will move on to other universities as graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and others are beginning their careers in the geospatial industry. Graduates: Please connect with GGIS on LinkedIn...
  • 2021-04-29 - by Kimberly Belser, College of LAS News Two Geography & GIS professors have received a $500,000 grant to bring more “big data” to the complicated process of crop yield forecasting. The grant from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture will assist research pertaining to...