2026 Rice GIS Showcase

Overview

Rice 2026 GIS Showcase

Get ready to join us on Tuesday, November 17th, 2026 for the second Rice GIS Showcase. This year's showcase will feature presentations from cutting-edge spatial research from Rice faculty, research centers, and graduate students. Share your ideas and make cross-disciplinary connections.

The Rice GIS Showcase is a one-day meeting of GIS researchers and teachers across the university to present completed or in-progress research and new tools in the field. Attendees will also have the chance to network with like-minded researchers, share research strategies, and foster intra-university collaboration. The showcase will include short informal presentations and tables for GIS researchers and groups. The event will be open to all students, staff, and faculty of the university. Snacks and lunch will be provided!

Showcase: Tue, Nov 17 · 8:45 AM – 3:30 PM
GIS Day workshops: Wed, Nov 18 · 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Where: Kraft Hall, Room 130
Who: Open to all Rice students, staff & faculty
Food: Breakfast, snacks & lunch provided

Get involved

Register

Attend the showcase

Reserve your spot for talks, tables, and lunch on November 17.

Register as an attendee

Enter the StoryMap contest

Submit a StoryMap for the gallery session and competition.

Register for the contest

Join a workshop

Hands-on ArcGIS sessions on GIS Day, November 18.

Pick a workshop

Showcase

Presenters & partners

Faculty, research centers, graduate and undergraduate students presenting spatial research, plus tables from GIS groups and community partners.

Faculty

Noemi Vergopolan

Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences

Dr. Noemi Vergopolan is a computational hydrologist on the water and climate nexus. Her research aims to aid actionable decision-making by improving hydrological information for monitoring and forecasting hydrological extremes and their impacts at the local scales. To this end, she develops scalable computational approaches for high-resolution hydrological prediction by leveraging advances in satellite remote sensing, land surface modeling, machine learning, data fusion, and high-performance computing.

Faculty

James R. Elliot

Sociology

James (Jim) Elliott is an award-winning sociologist who earned his Ph.D. in Sociology (with a minor in Geography) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Carolina Population Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. Before coming to Rice, he earned tenure at the University of Oregon and Tulane University, where he received presidential awards for his undergraduate, graduate, and service-learning teaching.

Faculty

Elizabeth Roberto

Sociology

Elizabeth Roberto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the founding Co-Director of the Center for Computational Insights on Inequality and Society at Rice University (CIISR). She has broad research interests in social and spatial inequality, a substantive focus on residential segregation, and methodological expertise in computational social science and quantitative methods. Her research uses innovative methods to examine the complex relationship between the social and built environment of cities. Dr. Roberto received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. She was awarded a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in Studying Complex Systems, which supported her postdoctoral research at Princeton University. Her research has also been supported by the American Sociological Association and the National Academies, and she is the recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

Staff

Bruno Sousa

Center for Research Computing

Bruno Sousa specializes in geospatial analysis, data visualization, and web applications. His projects cover fields including space exploration, public health, disaster response, environmental monitoring, and cultural heritage preservation.

Grad Student

Kyle Ostlind

SSPEED Center

Growing up in Houston, Kyle is intimately familiar with the flood issues that have long plagued the city. He hopes to use modeling softwares such as HEC-HMS and 2D HEC-RAS to help develop innovative flood mitigation strategies as well as to improve our understanding of and ability to model the impact of storms on the Houston area. Furthermore, Kyle is interested in helping improve the modeling of floods related to tropical cyclone rainfall and storm surge. In the future, Kyle hopes to enter industry and work to help cities become more resilient in the face of an increasingly more volatile climate.