Alexander Michels

Assistant Professor - Economic Political and Policy

Alex’s research focuses on applications of geospatial data science and cyberGIS to address societal challenges.

+1 (972) 883-4712
GR 3.824
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Currently accepting undergraduate and graduate students

Professional Preparation

PhD - Informatics
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - 2025

MS - Geography
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - 2024

Research Areas

Spatial Data Science

Developing algorithms, software, and theories to advance spatial data science and solve real-world problems.

CyberGIS

Using cyberinfrastructure (e.g., High-Performance Computing [HPC]) to solve computationally intense spatial problems.

Publications

I-GUIDE Platform for Geospatial Data-intensive Convergence Research and Education 2025 - Conference Paper

Vulnerable Neighborhood Explorer (VNE): An Open-Source Visual Analytics Tool for Exploring Social Vulnerability to Disasters across Different Neighborhoods 2025 - Journal Article

An Areal Approach to Spatial Accessibility Analysis 2024 - Journal Article

EasyScienceGateway: A new framework for providing reproducible user environments on science gateways 2024 - Journal Article

SPASTC: a Spatial Partitioning Algorithm for Scalable Travel-time Computation 2024 - Journal Article

CyberGIS-Vis for Democratizing Access to Scalable Spatiotemporal Geovisual Analytics: A Case Study of COVID-19 2024 - Conference Paper

Providing Accessible Software Environments Across Science Gateways and HPC 2024 - Conference Paper

Daily changes in spatial accessibility to ICU beds and their relationship with the case-fatality ratio of COVID-19 in the state of Texas, USA 2023 - Journal Article