When not climbing in the Alps or racing a carbon fiber Pinarello, I am an applied mathematician, geographic information systems (GIS) scientist and former professor at Johns Hopkins University. I currently teach courses in the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of GeoAI and the mathematics of deep and machine learning at University College London, and at Sorbonne Université - Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris.

My mathematical research concentrates on developing solutions to the uncertain geographic context problem, on deriving an algebraic basis for the change-of-support issue in spatial-temporal data, and formalizing the underlying mathematics of the modified areal / temporal unit problems .

Interested in AI interpretability, I am working on mechanistic approaches to reverse-engineering model computation — using tools like attribution graphs and sparse feature decomposition to trace how information flows from prompt to response.

An affiliated researcher at the Data Science & AI Institute at Johns Hopkins, I have also recently joined the struggle to understand the mathematical foundations of neural networks, using renormalization group methods.

I am the founder and director of BIOMAP AI , where we use bioinformatic and genomic data, machine learning, and advanced geographic information systems, to study the stochastic non-stationary transmission and risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks, along with the movement and migration patterns of their animal hosts.

Interested in preserving the early history of GIS and early applications of computer technology to spatial problems, I founded the Relic-Code Lab, where our research is dedicated to the reconstruction and conservation of historic software—programs, algorithms, and computational systems that have historically shaped our digital world, but which are now technologically inaccessible or materially endangered.

Our work combines digital forensics, archival research, programming language history, and emulation to bring vanished computational objects back into view. We collaborate with libraries, museums, and archives to preserve fragile code and to document the intellectual, political, and social contexts that gave rise to these artifacts.

Our current conservation projects center on reconstructing the code of the Simulmatics Corporation, who revolutionized computational election and voting trend analysis in the 1960s; on preserving materials from the early use of computers in US congressional redistricting; conserving the early mathematical proof assistant, the Logic Theorist; and working on emulating the code found in the seminal Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography.

The author or editor of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times bestseller and NPR selection, MAP: exploring the world , I am currently trying to turn a mess of mathematical course notes into the forthcoming book, Lectures on Mereotopology and the Ontological Foundations of Geographic Information Science.

My latest article, To Save Lives: Lessons of a Pandemic Cartographer , was recently published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, I find being close to the gentle hum of supercomputers, pondering the hidden complexities of AI interpretability, and exploring the mathematically deep labyrinths of the renormalization group, strangely comforting.

I currently live inNice, France.