Orhun Aydin is an Assistant Professor in the Earth, Environmental and Geospatial Science and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Saint Louis University, where he leads the AI-CHESS Lab on research into geospatial machine learning (GeoAI), geospatial IoT networks, and near-live Urban Digital Twins for resilience problems. His work combines Earth observations, in-situ measurements, process models, and spatially-explicit AI to for decision making and multi-horizon planning under uncertainty. His research interests include graph-based regionalization, spatial game theory, and numerical representations of spatial data in large digital twins. He also develops and deploys low-cost geospatial IoT sensor networks and operates UAVs for data collection.
He directs the Department of Energy’s Resilience Center ADAPT-STL in St. Louis, Missouri and has secured over $3 million in research funding. Previously, he worked at Esri as a research scientist and product engineer on spatial statistics and spatiotemporal machine learning, and he has taught GIS and GeoAI methods at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California.