Alex Michels

Alex Michels is a PhD candidate studying Spatial Informatics under Dr. Shaowen Wang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is currently a research assistant at the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies and will be on the job market in Fall 2024.

Alex is passionate about access & cyberGIS meaning: (1) using cyberGIS to explore, model, and analyze spatial patterns and systems of inaccessibility and inequity and (2) making cyberGIS tools and technology accessible to all. His work in analysis and modeling includes Spatial Agent-Based Models (SABMs) for public health and work advancing the methods of spatial accessibiliy with applications including the WhereCOVID-19 Spatial Accessibility Explorer for rapidly measuring spatial accessibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. His work on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible) computing in the geosciences includes contributions to CyberGISX, CyberGIS-Jupyter for Water (CJW), and CyberGIS-Compute.

News

Mar 28, 2024 Our ongoing work to increase accessibility to HPC is out in SoftwareX: CyberGIS-Compute: Middleware for democratizing scalable geocomputation. Documentation for the project can be found here.
Mar 25, 2024 Excited to announce that I’ve passed my preliminary exam and become a Ph.D. candidate! I’m planning to graduate Spring 2025, so I’ll be on the job market Fall 2024.
Mar 13, 2024 Check out my latest paper in the International Journal of Geographic Information Science: SPASTC: a Spatial Partitioning Algorithm for Scalable Travel-time Computation

Selected Publications

  1. CyberGIS-Compute: Middleware for democratizing scalable geocomputation
    SoftwareX, 2024
  2. 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
  3. EasyScienceGateway: A new framework for providing reproducible user environments on science gateways
    Michels, Alexander, Padmanabhan, Anand, Li, Zhiyu, and Wang, Shaowen
    Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2023
  4. Impacts of Catchments Derived from Fine-Grained Mobility Data on Spatial Accessibility
    Michels, Alexander, Park, Jinwoo, Li, Bo, Kang, Jeon-Young, and Wang, Shaowen
    12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2023), 2023