The latest from SDSC
From March 1 to June 1, 2026, SDSC's recent news points to a center building momentum through peer-reviewed methods, international academic exchange, conference visibility, and new research capacity. The stories in this window are varied, but they share a clear pattern: SDSC is strengthening its methodological core while widening the audiences and collaborations around that work.
Taken together, the last three months read less like a single headline and more like a connected run of publication, recognition, grants, and convening. The center's work is moving through journals, conference programs, invited talks, and international visits at the same time.
The newest item points outward. A. Stewart Fotheringham will travel to China in mid-June 2026 to present at Chongqing University, receive an Honorary Professorship, and then continue to Nanjing to deliver a keynote address at the Population Geography Conference. It is a concise marker of the international reach of SDSC's work in spatial analysis.
Methodological research also remained central. Chen-Lun Kao, Mehak Sachdeva, and A. Stewart Fotheringham published "Uncovering Local Spatial Context via Multiscale Geographically Weighted Binomial Regression" in Spatial Statistics. The article adds another peer-reviewed contribution to SDSC's broader work on local spatial modeling and spatial heterogeneity.
The clearest public snapshot came at the 2026 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in San Francisco. SDSC sent 3 faculty members and 7 graduate students to present work spanning spatial modeling, causal inference, aging, mobility, elections, and environmental health. Add in specialty-group awards and elected board roles, and the picture from San Francisco was of a center with both range and growing visibility inside the discipline.
That visibility was matched by an important infrastructure development. Mehak Sachdeva, A. Stewart Fotheringham, and Mason Mathews secured a 2025-2026 FSU/AWS Research Acceleration Fund award, bringing $20,000 in AWS cloud computing credits to a project on the American electorate. The practical value is straightforward: large-scale longitudinal spatial analysis takes serious computing power, and this award gives the team more room to do that work.
There was a second grant headline as well. Mehak Sachdeva's First Year Assistant Professor Grant will support the construction of a high-resolution national voter database covering 2019 through 2022. Read alongside the AWS award, it suggests SDSC is not only funding individual projects, but also building reusable research infrastructure for work on urban polarization, partisan segregation, and the geography of political behavior.
Alongside the grant activity came a new publication from Amber DeJohn in Applied Geography, co-authored with Matthew Palm and Matthew Suandi. The article examines how transit investment can shape neighborhood outcomes by looking at alignments that were proposed but never built. It gives SDSC another peer-reviewed contribution in work linking infrastructure decisions to uneven local consequences.
The center's aging and health profile also moved further into view through the 2026 Geographies of Aging and the Life Course Symposium at Florida State University. Hosted by Amber DeJohn and joined by SDSC participants including Mason Mathews, Weining Kan, Stephen Liwur, and Ziqi Li, the event highlighted work crossing aging, health, mobility, and community well-being. Just as important, it showed SDSC taking on a convening role rather than only contributing individual studies.
That external reach was reinforced by Amber DeJohn's invited talk at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she spoke about digital health in later life. It was a smaller item than the grants or the conference, but still revealing. SDSC's recent work is moving through journals, conference programs, and invited academic exchange at the same time, which is often how a center's wider profile starts to take shape.
The overall picture from these three months is not one dramatic breakthrough, but something steadier and arguably more important. SDSC's recent news has been defined by accumulation: more grants, more publications, more convening, and more national and international visibility, all reinforcing one another. That is what gives this stretch of updates its weight.