Fangzheng Lyu, PhD

Fangzheng Lyu is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Virginia Tech. Prior to that, he worked with Prof. Shaowen Wang at the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital & Spatial Studies and Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE). He received a PhD in Geography (2024), an MS in Geography (2021) from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a BE in Computer Engineering (2018) from the University of Hong Kong.

His research interests are centered around GIScience, Geospatial Data Science and Computational Science, with a particular focus on modeling multi-scale urban climate dynamics using heterogeneous geospatial big data. Specifically, his research work focuses on 1) geospatial data science for understanding multi-scale urban dynamics; 2) scalable spatial algorithms for solving complex geospatial problems; and 3) democratization of cyberGIS for data-intensive geographic research. A common thread in his research is in understanding geospatial problems in urban dynamics, urban planning, health, and related fields with geospatial big data, cyberGIS, geospatial AI and high-performance geospatial computing.