Dr. May Yuan

May Yuan received all her degrees in Geography: B.S. 1987 from National Taiwan University and M.S. 1992 and Ph.D. 1994 from State University of New York at Buffalo. She is Ashbel Smith Professor of Geospatial Information Sciences (GIS) in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT-Dallas). She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Association of Geographers (AAG), and the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. From July 2022 to July 2025, she was on an assignment to the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a program director of Human-Environment and Geographic Science (HEGS). Her research has been supported by NSF, NASA, DoD, DHS, DOJ, DOE, NOAA, USGS, and NIST. She and her students at the Geospatial Analytics and Innovative Applications (GAIA) Lab explore ways to understand the dynamics of people, events, and places, as well as the connections among brain health, spatial behaviors, and the environment. They also investigate the learning mechanisms taken by humans or machines to conceptualize, represent, and compute geospatial processes.