Geography faculty member earns national research award

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Zhenlong Li, associate professor of geography at Penn State, has received the 2026 Early/Mid-Career Research Award from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) for research that has advanced the field of geographic information science.

UCGIS presents the award to an early- or mid-career researcher whose research works are seminal and have significant impacts on the geographic information science community.

“I feel deeply honored and grateful,” Li said. “The UCGIS Early/Mid-Career Research Award is very meaningful to me because UCGIS has long represented the core academic community in GIScience. Recognition from this community is special as it comes from scholars who understand the intellectual depth, technical challenges and societal value of GIScience research.”

Li studies geospatial big data, spatial computing, GeoAI — the combination of artificial intelligence and GIS — and, more recently, autonomous GIS. His work brings geographic thinking together with computational methods to study problems that vary across places, populations and environments.

“What makes this work important to me is its potential to make spatial analysis more intelligent, accessible and useful for real-world decision-making,” Li said. “Many societal challenges, including public health, disasters, environmental change, transportation and urban inequality, are inherently spatial. GIScience provides the concepts and tools to better understand these problems and support action.”

At Penn State, Li leads the Geoinformation and Big Data Research Laboratory, where his group develops geospatial methods and computing approaches for research across GIScience and applied fields.

He is also a faculty associate of the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS), a faculty affiliate of both the Social Science Research Institute (SSSI) and the Larson Transportation Institute, and a member of the Penn State Cancer Institute.

Li is an elected fellow of the American Association of Geographers. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles, many with students and postdoctoral researchers. His research has been supported by more than $2.3 million in funding directly allocated to him from grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health, U.S. National Science Foundation, NASA, the Taylor Geospatial Institute and others.

Li said the award also reflects the people who have contributed to his research program.

“I have been very fortunate to work with outstanding students, collaborators and colleagues,” Li said “My students have brought creativity, technical skill and persistence to our research projects. My collaborators across GIScience, public health, computer science, environmental science and urban studies have helped connect our methods to important real-world problems. I am also grateful to my mentors who supported me at different stages of my career and helped me understand how to build research that is both technically strong and socially relevant.”

Before joining Penn State, Li was an associate professor of geography at the University of South Carolina, where he was the founding director of the Center for GIScience and Geospatial Big Data and the Geoinformation and Big Data Research Laboratory. He earned a bachelor’s degree in GIScience from Wuhan University in 2006 and a doctorate in geography and geoinformation sciences from George Mason University in 2015.