Yet Another Geographer

About

My name is Levi John Wolf. I am a Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Quantitative Human Geography at the University of Bristol’s Quantitative Spatial Science Lab, Fellow at the University of Chicago Center for Spatial Data Science, an Affiliate Faculty at the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Geospatial Sciences, and Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. I work in spatial data science, building new methods and software to learn new things about social and natural processes.

In the past, I’ve worked on detecting gerrymandering, neighborhood dynamics, local models, bayesian computation… a whole gamut of spatial data science topics. In future, I’m broadly interested in figuring out ways to integrate spatial reasoning into data science techniques. This either looks like traditional spatial data science techniques that use augmented spatial information, or involves the development of entirely new spatial statistical models & data science methods.

I’ve worked at Nextdoor and CARTO (twice). Both were great places to work. I’m the author of cenpy, a wrapper for the US Census Bureau data API that discovers & updates itself when the API changes. I also am a co-maintainer of the Python Spatial Analysis Library - the main spatial stats library in Python, geopandas - the core of the geospatial software stack in Python, contextily - a library to add basemap tiles to your python maps, and wes, a simple library to make your plots have magical Wes Anderson palettes. I’m writing a book (due out in 2022) with my colleagues Dani Arribas-Bel and Sergio Rey on geographic data science. You can see us write it at geographicdata.science/book.