International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Peng GONG

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences in 2020, Professor Peng Gong is a distinguished Chinese geographer and remote sensing scientist whose research has made significant contributions to land-use change, environmental health, and sustainable urban development. Born in 1965, he received his B.S. in 1984 and M.S. in 1986 from the Department of Geography at Nanjing University and his Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1990. He subsequently held academic positions at the University of Calgary and the University of California, Berkeley, where he attained the rank of Professor. In 2016, he returned to China to establish the Department of Earth System Science at Tsinghua University, serving as its inaugural Chair, and subsequently served as Dean of the School of Sciences and Director of the China City Research Institute. He currently serves as Vice President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic Development) at the University of Hong Kong, where he is also Chair Professor of Global Sustainability. A Foreign Member of Academia Europaea, he has served as a member of the Earth League, the Future Earth Advisory Committee, and the Earth Commission, as well as a member of the International Advisory Group of The Lancet. His academic contributions have been recognised through research awards from the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, the Association of American Geographers, and Science China.

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Professor Gong’s research has focused on the mapping and monitoring of global environmental change, remote sensing ecology, and the modelling of environmentally related infectious diseases and healthy cities, with particular emphasis on land-cover and land-use classification, quantitative estimation of forest and grassland ecological parameters, and multi-source spatial data analysis. Through sustained research and international collaboration, he has contributed to the development of methods for large-scale environmental monitoring and the application of geospatial technologies to ecological and public-health research. He has co-chaired nine The Lancet research reports addressing climate change, health, and healthy cities in China, contributing to the integration of environmental and health perspectives in assessments of urban sustainability. He has authored more than 600 articles and ten books and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Geographic Information Sciences, now Annals of GIS. He has also served on the editorial and advisory boards of more than ten international journals. His professional activities have included national strategic consulting for the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, as well as participation in international initiatives including The Lancet Countdown. Collectively, his work reflects a sustained research programme connecting geospatial science and remote sensing with the study of environmental change, public health, climate adaptation, and sustainable urban development in China and internationally.