Somayeh Dodge

I am Somayeh Dodge, an Associate Professor in the UCSB Geography Department. I lead the MOVE Research Lab and serve as an Associate Director for the Center for Spatial Studies and Data Science.

With the goal of understanding geographic processes that shape and impact life in social and ecological systems, my research develops data-driven and spatial science approaches to study and model movement and social interactions in human and ecological systems. I love working with data to explore the impacts of environmental changes through the lens of movement.

I received my Ph.D. in Geography with a specialization in Geographic Information Science (GIScience) from the University of Zurich in November 2011. I hold an MS in GIS Engineering and a BS in Geomatics Engineering from the KNT University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. I am a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award 2021 for the project CAREER: Modeling Movement and Behavior Responses to Environmental Disruptions. I received the 2025 Early/Mid-career Research Award from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), and the 2022 SAM-AAG Emerging Scholar Award from Spatial Analysis and Modeling (SAM) Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers.

Before joining the UC Santa Barbara faculty in July 2019, I worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2016-2019) and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (2013-2016). Prior to that, I completed two postdoctoral fellowships at the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geodetic Engineering at The Ohio State University (2012-2013) and at the University of Zurich (2011-2012) on Computational Movement Analytics.

For more information, please visit my personal website. To contact me, please email: sdodge[at]ucsb.edu.

Current Postdoctoral Researchers

Niall Newsham

I am Niall Newsham, a postdoctoral research scholar within the MOVE Research Lab at UC Santa Barbara. My research focuses on applying spatiotemporal methods to understand contemporary population change dynamics, with a particular interest in population decline, low fertility and migration trends. I am also interested in studying temporal processes through the use of sequence analysis and developing machine learning models to forecast population change outcomes and trajectories of human mobility.

I received my PhD in Human Geography from the University of Liverpool in February 2024, having previously completed an MS in Demography and a BS in Geography. I have studied at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago, and the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. I am a member of the IGU Commission on Population Geography and a Research Associate of the Broom Center for Demography. For more infortmation, check out my personal website.

Current Graduate Students

Danial Alizadeh

My name is Danial Alizadeh. I am a garduate student in GIScience at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to that, I obtained my MS degree in GIS engineering from the University of K. N. Toosi University of Technology, an my BS degree in Surveying-Civil engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran. My research interest primarily focuses on Urban-Human Mobility analytics using machine learning and deep learning approaches to study how people move within urban or non-urban settings and how their movement is impacted by environmental factors. To find out more about my research, please check out my Google scholar and Linkedin page.

Yifei Liu

I am Yifei Liu, a Ph.D. student at UCSB Geography Department. I received my B.S. and M.S. degree in Ecology from Fudan University (Shanghai, China) in 2018 and 2021, respectively. My research focuses on movement ecology and ecosystem dynamics, especially the impact of human interference and land-use change on the movement behavior of tigers and leopards in Thailand, assisted with spatial data science and spatiotemporal modelling.

Yeshuo Shu

I am Yeshou. My research focus on examining equitable access to modern modes of transportation through human mobility analysis. I develop methods to model movement and apply machine learning techniques for pattern recognition from movement data.

Zijian Wan

My name is Zijian Wan. I am a graduate student with a focus on movement modeling and analysis, often in a big geospatial data context and using approaches in spatiotemporal data mining. My research interests lie at the intersection of GIScience, spatial data science and machine learning. I received my BS in GIScience from Wuhan University, China, in 2020. Please find more information about me on my personal website.

Lab Alumni and Affiliates

Dr. Evgeny Noi

Evgeny Noi was a graduated researcher at the MOVE Lab between 2019-2024. He received his PhD in 2024. His research focused on “Mapping Mobility Disruptions: Understanding Human Movement in Crisis Contexts”. After graduation from UCSB, Dr. Noi moved to a postdoctoral research after his graduation at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More information about Evgeny can be found at his personal website

Dr. Seonga Cho

Seonga Cho was a graduated researcher at the MOVE Lab between 2020-2024. He received his PhD in 2024. His research focused on “Challenges and Solutions in Multi-objective Spatial Optimization Involving Continuous Space Siting”. After graduation from UCSB, Dr. Cho moved to a postdoctoral research after his graduation at the EPFL in Switzerland.

Dr. Rongxiang Su

Rongxiang Su was a graduated researcher at the MOVE Lab between 2019-2023. His PhD research focused on understanding human mobility patterns, travel behavior and urban dynamics using spatiotemporal analytics, discrete choice modeling, and machine learning techniques. After graduation from UCSB, Dr. Su moved to MIT Senseable Lab for a postdoctoral research. More information about Rongxiang can be found at his personal website.

Dr. Crystal Bae

Dr. Bae is a former MOVE Postdoctoral Researcher (2020-2021), working on the intersection of geographic movement visualization and spatial cognition. After their Postdoc in the MOVE lab, Bae accepted a position of Instructional Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. More information is available on personal website.

Mary Salami

Mary Salami graduated with a M.A. in Geography from UCSB in 2025. She also hold a B.S. degree in Surveying and Geoinformatics from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria.