Teaching

Courses Taught as Instructor of Record

Spatial Data Science (GISC 4381/6321), Fall 2025
Geospatial Information Sciences, UT Dallas
This course aims to help students develop knowledge and skills to ask spatial questions, find, process and analyze spatial data, solve spatial problems, and communicate their findings.

Business Location Decisions (GGIS/BADM 205), Spring 2023
Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, UIUC
Syllabus available here
Analyzes location decision-making emphasizing industrial and commercial location patterns; identifies important institutional factors and their changing roles over the recent past; and focuses on plant closings, economic disruptions, and problems of structural change.

Awards & Certificates

Certificate in Foundations of Teaching
May 5th, 2023
The Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning
University of Illinois

Teacher Ranked As Excellent By Their Students
June 2023
Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning
University of Illinois

Tutorials & Workshops

• Introduction to the I-GUIDE Platform
  

  Alexander Michels
  I-GUIDE Virtual Consulting Office (VCO) July 2025

• Introduction to the I-GUIDE Platform
  

  Alexander Michels
  I-GUIDE Forum 2025 June 2025

• Calculating Spatial Accessibility in Python with the I-GUIDE Platform
  

  Alexander Michels
  I-GUIDE Virtual Consulting Office (VCO) May 2025

• Introduction to Git
  

  Alexander Michels
  I-GUIDE Summer School 2024: Leveraging AI for Environmental Sustainability August 2024

• I-GUIDE Platform
  

  Anand Padmanabhan* and Alexander Michels*
  I-GUIDE Summer School 2024: Leveraging AI for Environmental Sustainability August 2024

• Geospatial Knowledge Discovery Harnessing Pre-trained Language Models on CyberGISX
  

  Zhaonan Wang, Wei Hu, Alexander Michels and Anand Padmanabhan
  NSF HDR Ecosystem Conference October 2023

• CyberGIS-Compute: Geospatial Middleware for High-Performance Computing
  

  Alexander Michels and Anand Padmanabhan
  I-GUIDE Forum 2023 October 2023

• CyberGIS-Compute: Geospatial Middleware for Simplifying Access to High-Performance Computing
  

  Alexander Michels and Furqan Baig
  ACES Workshop 2023 July 2023

• CyberGIS-Compute: Geospatial Middleware for High-Performance Computing
  

  Alexander Michels
  AAG 2023 March 2023

• CyberGIS-Compute: Enabling Simplified Access to High Performance Computing for your Geospatial Computation.
  

  Anand Padmanabhan* and Alexander Michels*
  NSF Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) - Virtual Consulting Office Nov 2, 2022 | Video

• CyberGIS-Compute: Geospatial Middleware for Simplifying Access to High-Performance Computing.
  

  Anand Padmanabhan* and Alexander Michels*
  NSF Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) - Virtual Consulting Office July 27, 2022 | Video

I’ve also created materials for a variety of tutorials/workshops on topics like cyberGIS, software hacking, HPC, and more. Materials here