Guangqing Chi

Dr. Guangqing Chi is Associate Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography with courtesy appointments in Department of Sociology and Criminology and Department of Public Health Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University. He also serves as Director of the Computational and Spatial Analysis Core of the Social Science Research Institute and Population Research Institute. Dr. Chi is an environmental demographer. His research examines the interactions between population change and the built and natural environments. He pursues his research program within interwoven research projects on climate change, land use, and community resilience, with an emphasis on environmental migration and critical infrastructure/transportation and population change within the smart cities framework. Most recently, Dr. Chi has applied his expertise in big data to study issues of generalizability and reproducibility of Twitter data for population and social science research. He also studies environmental migration, including projects on coupled migrant-pasture systems in Central Asia, permafrost erosion and coastal communities, and ecological migration in China. Dr. Chi's research has been supported through grants from national and state agencies, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and U.S. Department of Transportation. He has published about 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals. His research on gasoline prices and traffic safety has been highlighted more than 2,000 times by various news media outlets, such as National Public Radio and Huffington Post.