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 Natural and Mathematical Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and is a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation. He has served as Founding Director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies at UIUC since 2013. He previously served as Head of the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science from 2017 to 2023 and as Associate Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for CyberGIS from 2010 to 2017. He was a Visiting Scholar at Lund University (2006) and Harvard University (2023).
His research and teaching interests broadly include geographic information science and systems (GIS), artificial intelligence and cyberGIS, complex social and environmental problems, computational and data sciences, geospatial science and technology, high-performance and distributed computing, and spatial analysis and modeling. His research focuses on advancing cyberGIS, geospatial data science, and spatial artificial intelligence (AI) to develop scalable solutions for complex geospatial problems and sustainability challenges. He has received research funding from several U.S. federal and state agencies (e.g., CDC, DOE, Illinois EPA, NASA, NIH, NOAA, NSF, USDA, and USGS) and industry, and served as principal or co-principal investigator for over $60 million research grants. He currently serves as the principal investigator and director of the Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) funded by the National Science Foundation. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers & reports and edited or co-edited several books and proceedings. He has served as an action editor of GeoInformatica, associate editor of SoftwareX, and guest editor or editorial board member for multiple other journals, book series, and proceedings.
His research, teaching, and services have been recognized by many awards. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2009. He was named a Helen Corley Petit Scholar for 2011-2012, Centennial Scholar for 2013-2016, and Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar for 2018-2021 by UIUC’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Association of Geographers (AAG), and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). He received the 2022 AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors. He served as President of UCGIS from 2016 to 2017, and as a member of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine from 2015 to 2020.