Current Students (Gopal First Reader)
Yaxiong Ma received his PhD in July 2021 for Spatializing Coupled Human and Natural System (CHANS). He is now a post-doc at BU. His related to spatial modeling and spatial statistics. His first paper on Boston Housing is published in the Sustainability 2018, 10(4), entitled Geographically Weighted Regression Models in Estimating Median Home Prices in Towns of Massachusetts Based on an Urban Sustainability Framework. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10041026. His second paper aims to develop a new and improved algorithm to map the spatial distribution and dynamics of floating and emergent aquatic vegetation in on detecting floating vegetation in the Lake Kyoga region of Africa. The study utilizes a time series of 440 Landsat images dating from 1986-2020. A series of water and
vegetation indices are designed to characterize and map the maximum extent of water bodies and identify aquatic vegetation.
His third paper examines biodiversity impacts resulting from energy investments with and without Chinese development finance. Spatial morphological pattern analysis is proposed to examine the relationships between forest core and edge effects on biodiversity. The analysis enables us to address conservation questions relevant to developmental finance in energy in
different forest structures. His fourth paper is “Seeing The Invisible: From imagined to virtual urban landscapes” analyzing gas leaks in Boston. Ma designed a Virtual Reality (VR) application to show the interconnectedness of infrastructure features in cities. VR proved to be useful for communicating spatial information to urban stakeholders about the complexities of infrastructure ecology and the interactions between infrastructure features.
Gopal (Second or Third Reader)
Jessica Wright is working on the detection and impacts of gas leaks in Boston.
Andrea Digiorgio received her PhD in Anthropology for “Understanding Nutrient Drivers and Movement Ecology of Bornean Orangutan Foraging Behavior”. Andrea is a member of the Princeton Writing Program Seminar Faculty(link is external).
Che Xin, now a doctoral student at UCLA. He completed his masters at BU in 2019.
Juliette Bateman was BA/MA student who was part of our NSF IRES cohort that visited Indonesia in 2019. Our findings were presented in IGARSS 2019 conference. She is now a remote sensing specialist in USDA.
Emma Quirk worked on mapping biodiversity in SE Asia using geospatial data. She is a GeoAnalytics Analyst at Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Xingqiang Xu completed his master’s in 2021. He is now a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University.