Dr. Wenwen Li is a Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University (ASU), where she directs the Spatial Analysis Research Center (SPARC) and the Cyberinfrastructure and Computational Intelligence (CICI) Lab. Her research interests include cyberinfrastructure, big data, geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), and their applications in data- and computation-intensive environmental and social sciences. Her work has led to widely used cyberinfrastructure tools (e.g., PolarHub and PolarGlobe), and conceptual advances that support climate resilience, disaster response, humanitarian aid, and clean water access in underserved communities. She has published over 120 journal articles in leading disciplinary outlets, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Remote Sensing of Environment, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and International Journal of Geographic Information Science.
Dr. Li has served as principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on projects totaling over $23 million in research funding, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Defense (DoD), and organizations such as Google.org. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the NSF Mid-Career Advancement Award. Dr. Li is a Fellow of the American Association of Geographers and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. Her contributions to data science and informatics have also been recognized by the AGU’s Greg Leptoukh Lecturer Award and the Geological Society of America’s M. Lee Allison Award for Outstanding Contributions to Geoinformatics and Data Science.
Dr. Li holds a B.S. in Computer Science, a Ph.D. in Earth System and Geoinformation Science, and completed her postdoctoral training in Geography. Her interdisciplinary background informs a research agenda in Earth science informatics that is both methodologically innovative and societally impactful.