Yifang Ban

Dr. Yifang Ban is the Chair Professor and Director of Division of Geoinformatics at Department of Urban Planning and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Before joining KTH in 2004, Dr. Ban was a tenured Associate Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. She was an Assistant Professor at Stockholm University during 1998-2000 and a Senior Research Engineer at KTH during 1996-1997. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo in Canada in 1996.

Professor Yifang Ban's research interests include Earth observation big data analytics, multisensor data fusion,  machine learning/deep learning for mapping urbanization and land cover dynamics, monitoring wildfires and other natural hazards,  and assessing their environmental impact.  She has published extensively on these topics.  Professor Ban is the PI/Co-PI for a number of impactful projects, including EO-AI4GlobalChange (funded by Digital Futures), HARMONIA (funded by EU H2020), SAR4Wildfire (funded by FORMAS), and Climate Change Induced Disaster Management in Africa (funded by EU Erasmus+).

Professor Ban is an invited expert of the UN Habitat’s Technical Committee on Human Settlements Indicators for the SDGs.  She was an EU expert for evaluations of European Research Council proposals,  FP7 Marie Curie proposals as well as proposals for various national granting agencies.  She is also a co-chair (chair-elect 2023-2027) of ICA Commission on Sensor-Driven Mapping,  a co-lead of the GEO initiative ‘Global Urban Observation and Information’, an associate editor and guest editor of major remote sensing journals, and a committee member of major international remote sensing conferences.