Kwan, Mei-Po (1962–)

Mei-Po Kwan is distinguished professor of social and behavioral sciences in the department of geography at Ohio State University. She is primarily associated with the fields of geographic information systems (GIS) and urban, economic, transport, and health geography.

Kwan received a PhD in geography from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1994. She is editor of the Methods, Models and GIS section of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers and has received numerous honors and awards, including the prestigious UCGIS Research Award from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science and the Edward L. Ullman Award from the Transportation Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.

She is an internationally recognized leader in developing and implementing GIS-based methods in research involving individual-level data (both quantitative and qualitative), three-dimensional (3D) geovisualization, geocomputation, and feminist perspectives. Her varied research programs have addressed fundamental questions about geographic methods and have influenced the development of several areas in geographic information science (GIScience) in important ways. Her work has made substantial and broad contributions to the development of innovative geographic methods, including geocomputational algorithms for implementing space-time accessibility measures that are sensitive to individual differences, 3D interactive geovisualization of complex human activity travel data, qualitative GIS and narrative analysis, the use of GIS for articulating people's emotional geographies and as an artistic medium, network-based 3D topological data models, GIS-based intelligent emergency response systems, and protection of geoprivacy through geographic masking.

Her work has focused on individuals’ daily lives and the differences that gender, race, and religion can make on their experiences, mobility, and opportunities. She was the first to implement the time-geographic approach with innovative GISbased methods on large data sets. Using geocomputation and 3D geovisualization, her work has documented gender differences in individual accessibility that cannot be detected with conventional integral measures of accessibility or statistical approaches. This work has been expanded to take into account the impacts of information and communication technologies on people's daily activity patterns. This work has also led her to a critical engagement with feminist research methods and an ongoing process of reconciling GIS, critical geographies, and qualitative methodologies.