Siqin Wang

Siqin (Sisi) Wang, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Spatial Sciences with the Spatial Sciences Institute in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California.

Dr. Wang’s research interests are in GIScience, spatiotemporal big data analytics, digital health geography, human-centered GeoAI, human mobility and migration, human-climate interactions and computational social science more broadly, where she published +80 peer-reviewed journal articles since her PhD conferral in 2018.

She has been successful in securing numerous grants from prestigious funding organizations across multiple countries including the US, Australia, Japan, China and Morroco. Her scientific contributions can be reflected in She has been invited to give keynote talks at domestic and international conferences, and more than 30 universities in 10+ countries. Her research outcome has won her numerous awards, including 2024 Geospatial World 50 Rising Stars, 2024 International Geographic Union – Modelling Geographical Systems Commission (IGU-MGSC) Excellent Young Scholar Award, and 2021 Top 20 Global Frontier Science and Technology Young Scientist Award. Her co-first author 2021 paper on human mobility and COVID-19 transmission received the 2022 Best Paper Award and Most Downloaded Paper from the Annals of GIS in 2023.

Her professional roles include service as the Associated Chair for the Spatial Data Lab affiliated with Harvard University and as Vice Chair of the Young Scientist Innovation Network for Digital Earth of the International Society for Digital Earth.

She is dedicated to serve GIS community. At Harvard Ceter for Geographic Analysis, she iniatetd the Spatial Data Lab internship/fellowship program, involving 70+ students in 15 countries, including under-represented countries like Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigiria, Peru, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan. She has also served as a mapping volunteer in the GIS Corps, a non-profit organisation in the US since 2011 to help developing and undeveloped countries (e.g., North Korea) establish food security mapping systems – due to this work, she was awarded the Presidential Volunteer Service Award in 2012. 

Prior to joining the USC Spatial Sciences Institute, Dr. Wang was an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, and an Honorary Lecturer/Research Fellow with the University of Queensland, Australia. From April 2022 to July 2023, she also was a JSPS Research Fellow with the University of Tokyo, Japan, researching healthcare access and social vulnerability in the post-COVID Japan.