Emily Zhou

Biography

I am a geographer and GIScientist with interests in spatial analysis, spatial decision support, uncertainty, and the design and evaluation of geographic research. I hold a Master’s in City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design and a BA in Geography from Middlebury College, where I also minored in Computer Science and Japanese Studies. 

Research

My research examines how methodological choices shape the geographic evidence we produce and the decisions we make from it. I am particularly interested in uncertainty, spatial decision support, reproducibility and replicability, and the representation of geographic information. My work develops and evaluates spatial analytical methods to understand when geographic conclusions are robust to analytical choices, how uncertainty enters the research process, and how evidence from different places can be more transparently represented, evaluated, and accumulated. I apply these questions across public health, environmental, and planning contexts where spatial evidence is used to support scientific inference and decision-making.