Chishan Zhang

Chishan Zhang is a Global China Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, with a co-appointment at the BU Center for Remote Sensing (CRS). He holds a PhD in Geography and Environmental Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his research focused on Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) for advance smart agriculture, global food security, and environmental sustainability.

For his fellowship, Chishan is developing a new analytical framework to assess the environmental and social impacts of China’s overseas development finance. By integrating the GDP Center’s extensive finance databases with satellite imagery and machine learning, he aims to quantify the effects of foreign investment on land use, carbon emissions, and biodiversity. Prior to joining the GDP Center, he was a Frontera Computational Science Fellow at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).