Faculty Spotlight: Prof. Fang Fang
Fang Fang currently serves as an Associate Teaching Professor with appointments in the Policy School and the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. In this spotlight interview, Prof. Fang reflects on her career as a geographer specializing in urban greenspace and landscape dynamics and environmental planning, the power of GIS, and the upside of culture shock.
Your bio describes you as a geographer specializing in urban greenspace and landscape dynamics and environmental planning? Why are you passionate about this work?
No matter where you live, whether a big city or small town, you have to take care of the living environment around you. What excites me is the promise of using efficient techniques such as remote sensing, GIS and AI to improve the quality of life for all. I am also fascinated with integrating complex information–digital images, satellite images, GIS datasets—in order to tell a big-picture story that officials and community members can use to understand and meet the pressing challenges they face.
How did your upbringing influence your career path?
I was born in the city of Urumqi located in western China. My two brothers and I are triplets, which was quite a rare phenomenon in that time and place and even generated local TV coverage. I think the experience of frequently being dressed alike as young children and having our identities somewhat conflated motivated all of us to carve out very different pathways in life.
Which people in your life have served as our key mentors?
My greatest support and key mentor was my grandmother. She stood by me in every decision I made since I was a kid, and has remained my strongest ally throughout my adult life.
What trajectory did your education follow?
After completing an undergraduate degree in Natural Resource Management and Urban & Regional Planning at the Beijing Forestry University, I decided to move to South Korea to pursue a master’s degree in environmental engineering at UNIST. During my masters, I started to develop my GIS and remote sensing research focus, and to meet a lot of students like me from all over the world, the U.S., Europe, Mongolia. I’m still friends with many of them to this day. After that I completed my PhD in geography at West Virginia University. Moving to a rural area was a real culture shock but I fell in love with country music and discovered a love of the outdoors. After that, I joined the Department of Urban and Regional Planning as a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign before I joined Northeastern.
What kinds of research projects have you worked on that leverage your GIS and remote sensing expertise?
I collaborated with the District Department of Transportation’s (DDOT) Urban Forestry Division to integrate GIS and remote sensing into street tree management and future planning efforts, supporting the stewardship of public urban green spaces in Washington, D.C. Our work not only seeks to understand the spatial patterns of urban greenspace[1] but also explores their broader impact on climate change and extreme weather[2].
Another meaningful project involved using these tools to analyze post-wildfire management especially evacuation plans in the Pacific Northwest[3], the project I collaborated with Oregon State University and USDA Forest Service. Creating a GIS model for such plan requires taking into account many factors spatially such as population size, highway capacity, and travel time required to get to a safe distance. We also developed this online interactive map to help them understand how best to distribute resources for wildfire prevention.
Overall, technology paves the way for evidence-based decisions that place resources not always where they are requested but also where they are most needed, especially in underserved communities. I’m looking forward to integrating more computational AI into my work and using other trending technologies to help us better analyze our data and make smarter decisions. AI is a powerful tool if used wisely. I am also looking forward to engaging in more professional collaborations across the university and to getting involved in more projects in Boston.
What courses are you currently teaching?
I’m teaching a graduate course GIS for Urban and Regional Policy. In this class we will go over a variety of GIS tools to establish spatial awareness to understand our environment. I also teach another an undergraduate course called Bostonography. In this class, students are using public data from the history of Boston to understand issues ranging from land use changes, voting patterns, gentrification etc and coming up with an evidence-based decision.
[1] Fang, F., McNeil, B. E., Warner, T. A., Maxwell, A. E., Dahle, G. A., Eutsler, E., & Li, J. (2020). Discriminating tree species at different taxonomic levels using multi-temporal WorldView-3 imagery in Washington DC, USA. Remote Sensing of Environment, 246, 111811.
[2] Fang, F., Greenlee, A. J., He, Y., & Eutsler, E. (2023). Evaluating the quality of street trees in Washington, DC: Implications for environmental justice. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 85, 127947. [3] Dye, A. W., Kim, J. B., McEvoy, A., Fang, F., & Riley, K. L. (2021). Evaluating rural Pacific Northwest towns for wildfire evacuation vulnerability. Natural hazards, 107(1), 911-935.