Emerging Scholar Award

The emerging scholar award honors early- to mid-career scholars who have made significant contributions to education and research initiatives that are congruent with the mission of AAG-SAM. The candidates must have received their Ph.D. within the last 10 years and must be a member of the AAG-SAM at the time that the person is being nominated.

2023 Awardee:Song Gao from the University of Wisconsin – Madison


Dr. Song Gao, is an Associate Professor (with tenure) in GIScience at the Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he leads the Geospatial Data Science Lab (GeoDS@UW). He holds a Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara and alumni of the STKO Lab, a M.S. degree at the Institute of Remote Sensing and GIS, Peking University and alumni of the S3 Lab, and a B.S. degree with Honors at the School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, China.

His main research interests include Geospatial Big Data Analytics, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), GIScience theory, Human Mobility and Spatial Networks. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in prominent journals (e.g., PNAS) and conference proceedings, including 12 Web of Science Core Collection highly cited papers. He is the recipient for various fellowships, grants, and awards at the university, state, and national/international levels, including the ‘Waldo Tobler Young Researcher Award’ in GIScience selected by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS) Doctoral Scholarship, the International Cartographic Association (ICA) Scholarship, the Jack & Laura Dangermond Graduate Fellow, UCSB Geography Excellence in Research, AAG International Geographic Informational Fund, UW-Madison Undergraduate/Faculty HILLDALE FELLOW Award, NSF Grant, Microsoft AI for Earth Grant, and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Grant, etc.

He is an Associate Editor of Annals of GIS (2018-2022) and International Journal of Geographical Information Science (2023 – Now), and International Encyclopedia of Geography (2022-Now), Editor Board Members of Scientific Reports (Nature), Plos One, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Transactions in GIS, and serves as a peer reviewer and guest editors for a couple of high-impact academic journals. He has co-organized several workshops, symposiums, and paper sessions in AAG, ACM SIGSPATIAL, and GIScience. He is on the board of directors in the AAG GI Science & Systems, CyberInfrastructure specialty groups and CPGIS. He also had several software engineering summer internships including Esri Inc. (Applications Prototype Lab) and Apple Inc. (Maps Team) in California headquarters, and Esri Beijing R&D center. He has a passion for connecting theoretical research to advancements in GIScience to geospatial industry for solving real-world challenges. Publications and citations can be found in his Google Scholar page.

Past Awardees

2022

Somayeh Dodge from University of California, Santa Barbara

2020

Ran Wei from University of California, Riverside

2019

Wenwen Li from Arizona State University

2018

Steven Farber from University of Toronto at Scarboroughs

2017

Yongwan Chun from The University of Texas at Dallas

Xing-Jian Liu from University of Hong Kong


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