Patricia Solis

Patricia Solís, PhD, is Executive Director of the Center for Heat Preparedness. 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 Research Professor of Geography in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. 

She is Co-Founder and Director of YouthMappers, a volunteer consortium of student-led chapters which over the past decade has seen action on 420 university campuses in 80 countries who create and use open spatial data for humanitarian and development needs. Since launched at the White House in 2015, YouthMappers have created 27M edits, mapping nearly 1 million square kilometers of features and attributes on OpenStreetMap, touching the places where 67 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.

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. She co-developed the patented Knowledge Alliance Tool with B. Karna to innovate how universities partner with communities for the public good.

She also served 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 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. She is a Fellow of the American Association of Geographers.