Welcome to ANGEL!

Welcome to the ANalytical GEography Laboratory (ANGEL) at the Geography Department, University of Tennessee at Knoxville!

Our mission is to engage in interdisciplinary research and education to solve spatial problems across different disciplines (e.g., natural and social sciences, engineering, and humanities) and in different aspects of the society (e.g., human health, environmental justice, social media, etc.). At ANGEL we offers conceptual and technical expertise to all collaborative activities across campus through interdisciplinary research projects, service, and education.

Specifically, we conduct research to develop a theoretical and analytical framework in which the three key concepts in geography (e.g., scale, spatial dependence, and spatial heterogeneity) can be explored in an integrated fashion in complex studies with large spatial and spatiotemporal databases. We also aim to develop analytical techniques/tools/packages which can be used in real-world applications to enable organizations to make more-informed decisions. Researchers also can utilize our framework and tools to conduct scientific studies (e.g., to verify or disprove scientific models, theories and hypotheses) in dealing with complex issues across multiple scales.

We highly encourage you (e.g., faculty, students, researchers at UT and beyond, local communities, NGOs, etc.) to discuss with us your research and educational ideas/projects so we can establish and foster our collaboration on bringing spatial thinking and data analytical skills into complex interdisciplinary studies and real-world applications, benefiting people in the great State of Tennessee, in the US and around the world.