Dr. Qiusheng Wu is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Geography & Sustainability at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He also serves as an Amazon Scholar and has held positions as a Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University. Dr. Wu is a Google Developer Expert for Earth Engine and one of the most prolific open-source contributors in the geospatial community.
His research focuses on geospatial data science and open-source software development, with particular emphasis on leveraging big geospatial data and cloud computing to study environmental change, including surface water and wetland inundation dynamics. Dr. Wu is the creator of several widely-used open-source Python packages that have transformed how practitioners interact with geospatial data, including geemap (intuitive GUI for Google Earth Engine), leafmap (interactive mapping with minimal coding), segment-geospatial (AI-powered image segmentation), and geoai (geospatial artificial intelligence tools).
His teaching philosophy centers on making geospatial technology accessible to everyone. The geemap package was initially created in Spring 2020 to support teaching spatial data management and was later adopted by Google and included in official Earth Engine documentation. His open-source ecosystem, available at github.com/opengeos, has empowered thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide. Dr. Wu has authored multiple books including "Spatial Data Management with DuckDB" and "Earth Engine and Geemap: Geospatial Data Science with Python" published by Locate Press. He first encountered Landsat data through Google Earth in 2004 as an undergraduate student, sparking a career dedicated to making satellite imagery analysis accessible to all.
