Geography Ph.D. Candidate Ravi Thapaliya Selected for NSF I-GUIDE Summer School

Geography Ph.D. candidate Ravi Thapaliya was selected as one of only 30 scholars nationwide to participate in the prestigious 2026 NSF (National Science Foundation) I-GUIDE Summer School on Spatial AI and Convergence Science. Out of more than 150 applicants, less than one in five were accepted into the highly competitive program. His attendance at the event, held from July 13 to 17 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was fully funded by the NSF. 

The intensive program trained researchers in high-performance computing, spatial AI, machine learning, and advanced remote sensing techniques. The public can explore the open-source materials produced by Thapaliya’s team by visiting the VGI Spatial Bias Project Website, exploring the vgi-spatial-bias GitHub Repository, or interacting with the workflow directly via the I-GUIDE Platform Notebook.

Thapaliya is currently pursuing his dissertation research on urban forests, remote sensing, and urban heat mitigation under the mentorship and continued support of Dr. Gang Chen, the director of the Laboratory for Remote Sensing and Environmental Change (LRSEC).