Staff

Luc Anselin is the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and the College, the Director of the new Center for Spatial Data Science and a Senior Fellow at NORC. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Luc Anselin is a native of Belgium, where he did undergraduate work and a master's degree in economics and econometrics at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). His PhD is from Cornell University in the interdisciplinary field of Regional Science. Anselin is the developer of the SpaceStat and GeoDa software packages for spatial data analysis. 

Related Links: GeoDa | Google Scholar

Julia Koschinsky, PhD, is the Executive Director and Senior Research Associate of the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago and has been part of the GeoDa team for over 20 years. She has been conducting and managing research funded through federal awards of over $10 million to gain insights from the spatial dimensions of urban challenges in housing, health, and the built environment. Her current work focuses on integrating scientific reasoning with spatial data science.

Related Links: Integrating Scientific Reasoning with (Spatial) Data Science | Google Scholar | LinkedIn

Xun Li, PhD, is the Associate Director for Data Science at the University of Chicago's Center for Spatial Data Science. Prior to joining the Center, he worked as the principal software engineer of the GeoDa and GeoDa-Web software at Arizona State University. He also held software engineering positions at Foursquare/Unfolded, Motorola R&D, Microsoft Research, and Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs.

Related Links: Google Scholar

Crystal Bae is Assistant Instructional Professor of GIScience in the Division of the Social Sciences and the College. Her research in spatial cognition focuses on geographic movement visualization, real-world navigation, cognition of neighborhoods and regions, and social decision making. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography with an Emphasis in Cognitive Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a former postdoc of the Movement Data Science Lab at UCSB.

Related Links: Google Scholar | Personal Website

Zhuyin Li, MS, is a Research Associate (Pre-Doc) at the Center for Spatial Data Science. She completed her Masters in Computational Social Science at UChicago in spring 2025. Her research interests are at the intersection of economics and spatial data science, including spatial econometrics.  She plans to join a related PhD program in fall 2026.  Since January 2026, she has been working with Prof. Anselin on NSF-funded research regarding an open source ecosystem for spatial data science.