2022 TO 2023

Pedro Amaral is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. He is Chair of the Latin America Division of Regional Studies Association (RSA) and Deputy Secretary of the Brazilian National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Urban and Regional Planning (ANPUR).

Roger Bivand is a professor emeritus in economics at the NHH Norwegian School of Economics. He received his PhD degree in geography from the London School of Economics in 1975, after undergraduate study in Geography at the University of Cambridge. His research interests are in developing and supporting the development of open source software for analysing spatial data, including spatial econometrics.

Jonathan Dunn is a senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of Canterbury (NZL) where he uses computational models to understand spatial variation in language as part of the earthLings project (www.earthLings.io). The goal is to find out both (i) how large-scale population movements influence language and (ii) how information about human geography is available through language data.

Luisa Eusse-Villa is a PhD Student in the PhD Land, Environment, Resources and Health program at the University of Padova in Italy. She holds a joint MSc in Sustainable Forest Management from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Padova. She is originally from Medellín, Colombia, where she completed a BSc in Forest Engineering. She is interested in applying spatial data analysis to Environmental and Resource Economics to understand better the complexity of societal preferences towards different types of goods. Her PhD research includes modelling spatial heterogeneity in consumer preferences and explores how the spatio-temporal context affects willingness to pay estimates.

Sara Lafia is a Research Fellow at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan where she studies the impact of data curation on issues of data discovery and reuse. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Santa Barbara with an emphasis in Information Technology and Society.

Frantisek Masek is a PhD candidate in Economics at Sapienza University of Rome, Department of Economics and Law. His main research lies in the fields of monetary policy and heterogeneous agent models. Simultaneously, he conducts research in causal inference, especially using quasi-experimental methods in the spatial econometrics framework.

Johannes Moser is a research associate and PhD candidate with the Chair of Urban Development at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is currently investigating relations between high-speed rail and socioeconomic outcomes in Germany. His main research interests are spatial statistics and econometrics, transport geography, applied network science and economic history. He currently works on the spatial distribution of firm locations and real estate price developments as well as on space-time visualizations.

Niall Newsham is a PhD student in human geography at the Geographic Data Science Lab (GDSL) at The University of Liverpool. His research interests are centred around spatial demography, population change and population projection methods. His PhD project studies the extent, causes and future of sub-national population declines across Europe.

Jianzong (Harry) Pi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Ohio State University. His research interests include applied probability theory, statistical learning, optimization, and causal inference. His Ph.D. research focuses on the fairness and robustness of machine learning algorithms.

Renan Serenini is a PhD student at the European PhD in Socio-Economic and Statistical Studies at La Sapienza University of Rome and works at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). His research interest lie in Econometrics, Causal Inference and Public Health. His research includes the identification of spatial spillovers of public health policies in Brazil, the analysis of the spatial distribution of obesity and the use of spatial analysis in causal inference.

Luciana Soares Luz do Amaral is an Associate Professor in the Department of Demography (Cedeplar/FACE) at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. Her research interests include demography of education, economic demography,  and the intersection between population dynamics and public policy.

Gang Xu is a research associate with the Department of Geography and the Center of Geocomputation for Social Sciences at Wuhan University, China. His research interests include urban land use changes and environmental consequences, urbanization and complex urban systems, and spatial analysis. He is currently applying the theory of complex systems to understand cities undergoing rapid urbanization, including urban land, air quality, and urban health.