Author: Jay Scholz

The American Association of Geographers (AAG) Fellows is a recognition and service program that applauds geographers who have made significant contributions to advancing geography.  Congratulations to Professor Song Gao who was recently selected into the 2024 AAG Fellows! 

Source: https://www.aag.org/2024-aag-awards-recognition/#fellows

Dr. Song Gao is an associate professor of geography and the director of the Geospatial Data Science Lab at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He has established himself as one of the thought leaders and highly cited scholars in the field of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) and was heavily involved in the geospatial modeling of the spread of COVID-19. He has successfully mentored young scholars and students in GIScience, offered workshops and webinars for the AAG and other organizations, and is an associate editor for AAG’s International Encyclopedia of Geography and International Journal of Geographical Information Science. Dr. Gao’s involvement with cutting-edge data science and AI techniques, his commitment to taking on and solving important challenges, and his enthusiasm for working with different international organizations make him a strong asset to the AAG.

Recently, Prof. Song Gao received the 2023 Emerging Scholar Award by the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Spatial Analysis and Modeling (SAM) Specialty Group.

The AAG SAM Emerging Scholar Award The emerging scholar award honors early- to mid-career scholars who have made significant contributions to education and research initiatives that are congruent with the mission of AAG-SAM. The candidates must have received their Ph.D. within the last 10 years and must be a member of the AAG-SAM at the time that the person is being nominated.

The University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) is pleased to announce that Dr. Song Gao, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin – Madison, has been selected to receive its inaugural Early-Mid Career Research Award.

As a young scholar in the field of GIScience, Dr. Gao’s scholarly output constitutes an impressive list of well-cited publications that are proving to furnish innovative ideas and methods impacting the theory and practice of GIScience within the interface of geospatial artificial intelligence (particularly machine learning), big spatial data, and a more humanistic oriented place-based GIS. In addition, Dr. Gao has secured substantial sums of external funding to support his research, and has begun filling GIScience Community leadership roles. The UCGIS Research Awards Review Committee assesses that Dr. Gao has achieved a national and international GIScience profile and reputation that far exceeds expectations for a junior scholar.

The UCGIS Early-Mid Career Research Award is to celebrate an outstanding early-mid career research record of innovative ideas or methods that lead to research impacts on the theory and/or practice of GIScience or geographic information technology.

UCGIS will honor Song Gao and other award recipients as part of its Symposium 2022 programming activities.