Eli Knaap, Ph.D | @knaaptime

I am a Senior Research Scientist and the Associate Director of the Center for Open Geographical Science at San Diego State University. I am a spatial data scientist trained in stratification sociology, urban economics, and quantitative geography, and I study social inequality and spatial structure in neighborhoods, cities, and regions.

My research focuses on urban analytics, spatial policy analysis, and neighborhood dynamics. I have published widely on topics including segregation, neighborhood effects, fair housing policy, gentrification, economic geography, public health, and urban modeling.

As a result, I develop and maintain several open-source software packages for spatial statistics, neighborhood dynamics, and segregation analysis. The goal of this work is to advance the state of spatial data science and inform urban policy, planning, and social science with rigorous, reproducible, spatially-explicit methods.

My work in both methodological development and applied analytics has received financial support from NSF, NIH, HUD, the Urban Institute, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners Inc., the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, among others.

Apart from research at COGS, I lead the development of geosnap, the Geospatial Neighborhood Analysis Package; I serve currently on the North American Regional Science Council, Treasurer of the Northeastern Regional Science Association, a core developer and steering committee member for the Python Spatial Analysis Library (PySAL), and a lead developer at QuantEcon. I am also an affiliate at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education.