Biography
Shaowen Wang is a Professor and Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science; Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar; and an Affiliate Professor of the Department of Computer Science, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has served as Founding Director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies at UIUC since 2013. He served as Associate Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for CyberGIS from 2010 to 2017 and Lead of NCSA’s Earth and Environment Theme from 2014 to 2017.
Research Interests
- geographic information science and systems (GIS)
- advanced cyberinfrastructure and cyberGIS
- complex environmental and geospatial problems
- computational and data sciences
- high-performance and distributed computing
- spatial analysis and modeling.
Research Description
His research has been actively supported by a number of U.S. government agencies (e.g., CDC, DOE, EPA, NASA, NSF, USDA, and USGS) and industry. He has served as the principal investigator of several multi-institution projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for establishing the interdisciplinary field of cyberGIS and advancing related scientific problem solving in various domains (e.g., agriculture, bioenergy, emergency management, geography and spatial sciences, geosciences, and public health).
Education
- PhD, University of Iowa
- MCS, Computer Science, University of Iowa
- MS, Geography, Peking University
- BS, Computer Engineering, Tianjin University, China
Awards and Honors
He was a visiting scholar at Lund University, sponsored by NSF in 2006, and a NCSA fellow in 2007. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2009. He was named a Helen Corley Petit Scholar for 2011-2012 and Centennial Scholar for 2013-2016 by UIUC’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Courses Taught
- GEOG 480 - Principles of GIS
- GEOG 595 - Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies
- GEOG 479 - Advanced GIS
- GEOG 379 - Introduction to GIS
Additional Campus Affiliations
Computer Science Affiliate Professor
External Links
He served on the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science’s (UCGIS) board of directors from 2009 to 2012 and President of UCGIS from 2016 to 2017. He served on the advisory board of the NSF Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program from 2016 to 2018. He has served as a member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine since 2015.
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
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
Jaroenchai, N., Wang, S., Stanislawski, L. V., Shavers, E., Jiang, Z., Sagan, V., & Usery, E. L. (2024). Transfer learning with convolutional neural networks for hydrological streamline delineation. Environmental Modelling and Software, 181, Article 106165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2024.106165
Kang, Y., Lyu, F., & Wang, S. (2024). NetPointLib: Library for Large-Scale Spatial Network Point Data Fusion and Analysis. In PEARC 2024 - Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2024: Human Powered Computing Article 43 (PEARC 2024 - Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2024: Human Powered Computing). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3626203.3670615