Dr. Ming-Hsiang (Ming) Tsou is Professor of Geography, Director of the Center for Human Dynamics at the Mobile Age (HDMA), and the founding Program Director of Big Data Analytics Program (Master of Science) at San Diego State University. His research interests are in human dynamics, social media, big data, public health, visualization, and Web GIS. Dr. Tsou has received over $4.39 million extramural funding, as PI or Co-PI, and $22.25 million funding as Co-Investigators, from NASA, NSF, NIH, USFS, and several state and local government agencies. He has published 91 refereed articles, two books, and one National Research Council Report (co-authored in 2007) since he started his academic career at SDSU in 2000.

Dr. Tsou has collaborated with researchers at UCSD Moores Cancer Center and City of Hope to develop web-based GIS data visualization tools for studying health disparity of various cancers. He also collaborated with the County of San Diego Office of Emergency Services to develop an integrated wildfire evacuation decision support system (IWEDSS) by integrating social media, census survey, geographic information systems (GIS), real-time traffics, and remote sensing data.

One of his recent research efforts focus on the development of a research hub for COVID-19 outbreaks and the mapping of medical vulnerable population in San Diego (https://hdma-sdsu.github.io/). He is collaborating with several SDSU faculty from Public Health, Linguistics, Mathematics and Statistics, and Communication to develop a predictive model for COVID-19 spread patterns and to examine the geographic variations in social contexts and their influence on minority population and health disparities in relation to the COVID-19 outbreak.