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 study social inequality and spatial structure in neighborhoods, cities, and regions. My research focuses on topics including spatial inequality dynamics, segregation, neighborhood effects, fair housing policy, economic geography, public health, and urban modeling.

This work advances the state of applied spatial data science to inform urban policy and planning with rigorous, reproducible, spatially-explicit methods. As a result, I develop and maintain several widely-used open-source software packages for spatial statistics, neighborhood dynamics, and segregation analysis.

To support this research, I have received funding from NSF, NIH, HUD, the Urban Institute, the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners Inc., and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.

Currently I serve as the Treasurer of the Northeastern Regional Science Association, a core developer and steering committee member for the Python Spatial Analysis Library, a lead developer at QuantEcon and an Editorial Board member of Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy. I am also an affiliate at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education.