Guangqing Chi , Ph.D.

Dr. Guangqing Chi is an professor of rural sociology and demography at the Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Chi is an environmental demographer with a focus on socio-environmental systems. His research seeks to understand the interactions between human populations and the built and natural environments and to identify important social, environmental, infrastructural, and institutional assets to help vulnerable populations adapt and become resilient to environmental changes. A key characteristic of his research is the attempt to integrate social systems and the built and natural environments in understanding population dynamics by developing and applying innovative spatial and big data methods to traditional and nontraditional data. His current work investigates climate change impacts on coastal communities in the Arctic and climate-driven migration and left-behind children in Central Asia. He is an expert in spatial and big data analytic methods and lead author of the textbook “Spatial Regression Models for the Social Sciences” (SAGE 2019). Dr. Chi leads the POLARIS project and the establishment of an infrastructure for collecting and analyzing social media data (60+ TB; Twitter, Facebook, mobile phone).