A year of SDSC
Twelve stories reached the SDSC newsroom between October 12, 2025 and October 12, 2026, the center's first full year. They begin with the center being founded and end with a sandbox anyone can put their hands in. In between come grants, papers, conference talks and awards, and a lot of the work comes from graduate students as well as faculty.
The year opened in October 2025, when Florida State University formally launched the Spatial Data Science Center within the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy, with A. Stewart Fotheringham as director. The center started with three main projects: election analytics across more than 200,000 U.S. precincts, explainable GeoAI, and making MGWR fast enough to handle very large datasets on an ordinary laptop. Those three set the direction for much of what followed.
In November, Ziqi Li joined guest editors from Peking University, Emory University and the Technical University of Munich in calling for papers for an ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing special issue on interpretability and explainability in GeoAI. Submissions were due May 31, 2026. The issue follows the center's explainable-GeoAI work and asks the wider field the same question: how do you see why a spatial model gives the answer it does?
Spring: funding and new work
In April the election work received outside funding. Mehak Sachdeva, with co-PIs A. Stewart Fotheringham and Mason Mathews, received a 2025-2026 FSU/AWS Research Acceleration Fund award that includes $20,000 in AWS cloud credits. The project, Disentangling Sorting from Socialization, studies how moving house and neighborhood context shape political outcomes across the United States.
The same week, Sachdeva received a First Year Assistant Professor Grant for Placing Politics, which is building an individual-level national voter-file dataset covering 2019-2022 to study political engagement and partisan segregation. Together the two awards give the center's political research both the data and the computing power it needs.
Amber DeJohn spent the spring taking her aging and mobility research beyond Tallahassee. She was invited to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville to speak about digital health in later life.
At FSU she hosted the Geographies of Aging and the Life Course (GOAL) Symposium, the group's first independent meeting. Researchers in aging, health and geography attended, along with SDSC members including Mason Mathews, Ziqi Li, Weining Kan and Stephen Liwur.
She also published a paper in Applied Geography, written with Matthew Palm and Matthew Suandi, that estimates how transit investment changes neighborhoods. It does so by comparing them with transit routes that were proposed but never built.
The center's largest showing came at the 2026 AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco in March, where 3 faculty and 7 graduate students presented research on mobility, health, local spatial modeling and causal inference. Three members also won honors: Stephen Liwur won the HMGSG Health Data Visualization Award, Weining Kan was elected a graduate student board member of the same group, and Ziqi Li was elected to the board of the Spatial Analysis and Modelling group. A social event held with FSU Geography brought together more than 25 students, faculty and alumni, along with two former advisees of Fotheringham, Taylor Oshan and Levi Wolf.
Summer: papers, travel and recognition
In May, graduate research assistant Chen-Lun Kao published Uncovering Local Spatial Context via Multiscale Geographically Weighted Binomial Regression in Spatial Statistics, with Sachdeva and Fotheringham. It extends multiscale geographically weighted modeling to outcomes that are yes-or-no, and it builds on work Kao presented at AAG. It shows the center's MGWR work being carried forward by its graduate students.
In June, Fotheringham was due to travel to China. He was to give a presentation and receive an Honorary Professorship at Chongqing University, then deliver a keynote at the Population Geography Conference in Nanjing. It was further international recognition of his work in spatial analysis, and it took the center's research to audiences abroad.
In August, Ph.D. student Jacob N. Tagnan, who works with Mark W. Horner, was named a Doctoral Scholar in the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation's 2026 scholarship program. USGIF made 24 awards this cycle, and only three went to doctoral scholars. A national foundation chose the work of an SDSC graduate researcher.
Fall: something to try
The year closed in October with an augmented-reality sandbox, now calibrated and running thanks to Chen-Lun Kao. It reads the surface of the sand as people shape it and projects elevation bands and contour lines back onto it. Hold a hand over the box and it rains, and the water runs downhill into the lowest basin.
The sandbox is not a research instrument, and SDSC does not present it as one. Its value is explanation: a steep slope, a watershed, or the idea that the shape of the ground decides where water goes are all easier to see at the box than on a page. After a year mostly about grants, papers and talks, it gives visitors something to try rather than only something to read about.