Biosketch

Junghwan Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Virginia Tech and Director of Smart Cities for Good, a research group focused on tackling urban social and environmental challenges through AI-powered smart city technologies. He has published more than 45 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, including Journal of Transport Geography, JAMA Network Open, Communications Earth & Environment, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, and Travel Behaviour and Society. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, OpenAI, Virginia Tech’s Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment (ISCE), the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI), and a 4-VA grant.

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He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He also holds a B.S. in Urban Planning and Engineering (Summa Cum Laude) from Yonsei University in South Korea and a Master of Urban Planning (MUP) from the UIUC. Before joining Virginia Tech, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. 

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In addition to his academic career, he worked as a transportation planning modeler (internship) at the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission (CCRPC) for about two years. 

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Awards

Dr. Kim's works have been recognized with several awards.

• Outstanding Early Career Teaching Award, College of Natural Resources and Environment, Virginia Tech (2026) 

• American Association of Geographers (AAG) Council Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award (2019)

• Peter Gould Student Paper Award from the AAG Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group (2019)

• 2023 Most Downloaded Paper Awards (co-authored paper; Annals of GIS) (2023)

• Student Research Presentation Award from the Race/Ethnicity/Place Conference, First Prize (2020)

• American Planning Association (APA) Transportation Planning Division Student Paper Award, Third Prize (2018)

• APA National Smart Cities Student Design Competition Winner (in Team, 2017)

• Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the UIUC (2018)

• Student Paper Award from the Korean-American Association for Geospatial and Environmental Sciences (2020)

• President Award from the Korean Planning Association (2016)

• Recipient of the Study Abroad Scholarship and National Science and Engineering Scholarship from the South Korean Government (2016)

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Academic/Associate Editor

• Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2025-)

• PLOS One (2025-)

• International Encyclopedia of Geography (IEG) (2023-25)

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Board Member

• Korea-America Association for Geospatial and Environmental Sciences (KAGES) (2024-)

• The Korean Geographical Society (2025-)

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Program Committee 

• The 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Human-Centered Geospatial Computing (2025)

• The 8th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery (2025)

• The 33rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems Short Paper Track (2025)

• International Symposium of Spatiotemporal Data Science (2024)

• 32nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems Program Committee for Research, Industry, and Demonstration Tracks (2024)