Shuming Bao received his Ph. D. in applied economics from Clemson University. He is currently the director of the China Data Institute in the US, and the co-director of the Geocomputation Center for Social Sciences at Wuhan University. He was a faculty member and the director of the China Data Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before he started the China Data Institute in 2018. Dr. Bao has published more than 90 papers in the areas of GIS, regional economics, and spatial data analysis.