Patricia Solis

Patricia Solís, PhD, is Executive Director of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, a campus-wide effort to link multi-sector community needs with research innovations in building community resilience. The effort is funded by a grant from the Virginia G. Piper Trust, and engages a multi-disciplinary team of 50 community and academic fellows, 5 cross cutting design scholars, a team of 5 research professors, and a crew of 20 or so full time staff and graduate student assistants. Her work includes engagement to support the Arizona Governor's Office of Resiliency, especially related to extreme heat and strategic planning. She has been regularly interviewed by media, such as the Washington Post, New York Times, National Geographic, local TV and radio, and The New Yorker on her resilience work. She is Associate Research Professor of Geography in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. 

She is Co-Founder and Director of YouthMappers, a rapidly-growing consortium of student-led chapters on more than 411 university campuses in 78 countries who create and use open spatial data for humanitarian and development needs in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development, the main co-founding sponsor. Since launched at the White House in 2015, YouthMappers have created 24M edits, mapping nearly 1 million square kilometers of features and attributes on OpenStreetMap, touching the places where 52 million of the world's most vulnerable people live. Solís has developed new methodologies for combining geospatial fieldwork, crowdsourcing, and remote peer-to-peer open mapping to collect new data and GeoAI for sustainable development solutions and for incorporating data as a public good into official cartographies. She works to support YouthMappers with donors and partners from the non-profit, public and private sector, including Meta (Mapillary), Esri, Maxar, Microsoft, Mapbox, MapSwipe, US Department of Agriculture, US Geological Survey, State Department, NSF, etc. 

Prior to joining ASU, she was Co-Director of the Center for Geospatial Technology at Texas Tech University and Research Associate Professor of Geography in the Department of Geosciences and affiliated with the TTU Climate Science Center. She served as Deputy Director and Director of Research at the American Association of Geographers. Dr. Solís received a BS in Physics, BA in German, and MA in Geography from Kansas State University.  She earned her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Iowa where she was a Presidential Fellow.  

Solís has developed and executed more than 50 competitive research programs, 60% of them as lead or PI, with funding totaling ~ $19M as PI, promoting innovations in research, education and community collaboration with support from federal agencies such as the US National Science Foundation, the US State Department, NASA, NOAA, US Geological Survey, USAID, and others. She worked with the US Census Bureau on a new data product, Communty Resilience Estimates for Heat, co-invented a patent-pending tool for knowledge alliances, and holds trademarks for her creative scholarly works. Her research focuses on sustainability, resilience, applications of geospatial technologies as well as formal, informal and public educational activities. She regularly designs experiences for exchanges of knowledge, fellowships, and applications of open geospatial technologies to address socially relevant challenges, from sustainability to urban climate change induced hazards to broadening participation in higher education. Her creative leadership has resulted in the development of collaborative and participatory research methodologies, youth-engaged peer exchanges, new designs for research-centered learning, women's professional development, and the sustained institutionalization of public-private partnerships centered on using digital geographic technologies. 

Solís has published more than 75 articles, chapters, and briefing papers, as well as edited books on environment and sustainable development for Routledge and Springer. Her 2023 Open Mapping for the Sustainable Development Goals has been accessed nearly 250,000 times in its first year of publication. She is regularly recruited for high-level international keynote addresses, and has served on National Academies panels for data infrastructure innovation. Her international experience includes fostering north-south and south-south academic networks among emerging scholars in sixty countries across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.  These efforts have been recognized by the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development as a model program.  She also serves as the elected and State-Department appointed President of the PanAmerican Institute for Geography and History of the Organization of American States, the first woman to serve in this role in its 95-year history. She has been honored with the designation of National Researcher II from Panama (the equivalent of US National Academies), and twice the Enlaces Award for academic collaboration with Latin America. She served as a Specialist on the Fulbright Commissions’ Roster of Experts with the Politecnico Instituto di Milano in 2018 to develop a university service-learning GIS initiative. She was recognized as Geospatial Volunteer of the Year for the State of Arizona by the Arizona Geographic Information Council in 2019. She received AAG Service Honors in 2021 and the Media Award in 2024. She was recognized with the ASU President's Award for Global Engagement in 2023.