Titles

• Executive Director, Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at ASU, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
• Research Associate Professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Biography

Patricia Solís, PhD, is Executive Director of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, a campus-wide effort to link community needs with research innovations, managed in the College of Arts and Sciences. She also holds research faculty privileges in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning.

She is Co-Founder and Director of YouthMappers, a consortium of more than 120 universities in 38 countries that creates and uses open spatial data for humanitarian and development needs in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development.

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 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 over fifty competitively funded projects 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. Her research focuses on designing experiences for exchanges of knowledge, fellowships, and applications of open geospatial technologies to address socially relevant challenges, from water resource conflict to 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, and the sustained institutionalization of public-private partnerships centered on using digital geographic technologies.

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 Geography Commission of the PanAmerican Institute for Geography and History of the Organization of American States, and has been honored with the designation of National Researcher II from Panama and twice the Enlaces Award for academic collaboration with Latin America. She is named as a Specialist on the Fulbright Commissions’ Roster of Experts.

Education

• PhD, Geography, University of Iowa, 2002
• MA, Geography, Kansas State University, 1996
• BA, German, Kansas State University, 1994
• BS, Physics, Kansas State University, 1994

External Links

• Website