SPARC GIScience Webinar: From Backpacking to Academia

Lecture Title: From Backpacking to Academia: How life beyond academia shaped people skills and academic success in a global career pathway

Speaker: Siqin (Sisi) Wang, Associate Professor of Spatial Sciences, University of Southern California

About the Talk: This talk explores how experiences and interests outside academia, including backpacking, volunteering, travel photography and exploring different cultures, have unexpectedly shaped and strengthened Sisi Wang’s academic career. These experiences helped her develop skills in communication, relationship building, leadership, networking and cross-cultural collaboration.

Sisi has traveled to nearly 100 countries and taken five career gap years, working in more than 20 types of jobs and roles across government, technology, filmmaking and academia. She will share how traveling, volunteering, working across industries and building relationships with people from diverse backgrounds have helped her take on leadership roles and develop research collaborations spanning more than 50 institutions in 30 countries.

Speaker Bio: Siqin (Sisi) Wang is an Associate Professor at the Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Queensland and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. Her research focuses on computational social science and human-environment interactions using GeoAI and advanced spatial simulation, with 120+ publications.
She holds leadership and research roles with the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center, Harvard Centre for Geographic Analysis and several international geographic organizations. Her honors include Geospatial World 50 Rising Stars and the IGU-MGSC Excellent Young Scholar Award. She is also co-founder of AIforAfricanEducation and has volunteered with GISCorps since 2011, work that earned her the Presidential Volunteer Service Award.