About Us

The GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation succeeds the Spatial Analysis Laboratory (SAL) which was founded by the new School of Geographical Sciences Director Luc Anselin while at the University of Illinois. This laboratory has now ceased to exist. The new GeoDa Center builds upon the considerable international reputation of SAL and serves as a focal point to leverage currently dispersed faculty interest in geospatial analysis present at ASU.

It is devoted to the development, implementation and application of state-of-the-art methods of geospatial analysis to policy issues in the social and environmental sciences. Activities span the range from the creation of new methods for spatial data analysis, geovisualization, geosimulation and spatial process modeling to the implementation of these techniques in the form of software tools and support materials that address the needs of a growing worldwide geospatial analysis user community.

The center deals with research questions at different spatial scales, from the local to the global. Application areas include a range of substantive fields, such as regional science, economic geography, environmental economics, criminology, public health, and other social and natural sciences.