Alex Michels

Alex Michels is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He obtained his Ph.D. in Informatics in 2025 and M.S. in Geography in 2024, both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Alex’s research focuses on applications of geospatial data science and cyberGIS to address societal challenges.

If you’re interested in my work or collaborating, please feel free to reach out! If you want to chat over coffee, we can meet on campus at UIUC or I’m planning to attend these upcoming events in-person:

News

May 15, 2025 I have graduated with my Ph.D. and was officially hooded! I will be serving as a post-doc here at UIUC for another 2 months before starting another exciting journey in the fall!
May 13, 2025 Hope to see you at the I-GUIDE Forum 2025 where I’ll be giving a tutorial, discussing a recent paper, and I am a co-author on an exciting poster!
Mar 28, 2025 If you’re at AAG 2025, join us for our session “Challenges and Opportunities of Spatial Accessibility”!

Selected Publications

  1. An Areal Approach to Spatial Accessibility Analysis
    Michels, Alexander, Park, Jinwoo, Kang, Jeon-Young, and Wang, Shaowen
    Geographical Analysis, 2024
  2. CyberGIS-Compute: Middleware for democratizing scalable geocomputation
    SoftwareX, 2024
  3. SPASTC: A Spatial Partitioning Algorithm for Scalable Travel-time Computation
    Michels, Alexander, Park, Jinwoo, Kang, Jeon-Young, and Wang, Shaowen
    International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2024