SHIPENG SUN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Hunter College and the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program at Graduate Center, The City University of New York, New York, NY 10065. E-mail: shipeng.sun@hunter.cuny.edu.

The goal of my research program is to improve our understanding about highly integrated natural and human processes. Within the context of Land-System Science, I seek to understand how natural and human systems interact through feedback mechanisms and affect land management choices among humans and ecosystem (e.g., carbon storage) and biophysical processes (e.g., erosion) in natural systems. One component of this program involves finding novel methods for data collection (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles) that can be used to calibrate and validate models of natural systems at the resolution of decision makers. Another component of this program involves the design and construction of agent-based models to formalize our understanding of human decisions and their interaction with their environment in computer code. The most exciting, and remaining part, is coupling these two components together so that we may not only quantify the impact of representing their coupling, but more importantly to assess the impacts of changing climate, technology, and policy on human well-being, patterns of land use and land management, and ecological and biophysical aspects of our environment.

To achieve this overarching goal, my students and I conduct fieldwork that involves the use of state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in combination with ground-based light detection and ranging (LiDAR) equipment, RTK global positioning system (GPS) receivers, weather and soil sensors, and a host of different types of manual measurements. We bring these data together to make methodological advancements and benchmark novel equipment to justify its use in the calibration and validation of models of natural and human processes. By conducting fieldwork at high spatial resolutions (e.g., parcel level) we are able to couple our representation of natural system processes at the scale at which human actors make decisions and improve our understanding about how they react to changes and affect our environment.

**PROFESSIONS **

Associate Professor
School of Management Science and Engineering, Shandong Technology and Business University (Yantai 264005, P. R. China)

**EDUCATION BACKGROUDS **

Ph. D. Degree, 09/2009 – 07/2015
School of Economics and Management, Beihang University (P. R. China)

M. A. Degree, 09/2003 – 02/2006
The Institute of Systems Engineering, Dalian University of Technology (P. R. China)

B. A. Degree, 09/1999 – 07/2003
Department of Information and Control Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (P. R. China)

**VISITING & SUMMER SCHOOLS **

Visiting Scholar at GECS – Research Group of Experimental and Computational Sociology (March, 2017 – February, 2018)
 Università degli Studi di Brescia (Italy)
 Co-supervisor: Professor Flaminio Squazzoni

Summer school in ‘Agent-based modeling for social scientists’ (September 4-8, 2017)
 University of Brescia, Italy
 Instructors: Flaminio Squazzoni, Simone Gabbriellini, Nicolas Payette, Federico Bianchi

The Santa Fe Institute’s Massive Open Online Course: Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling (Jun 5 – September 8, 2017)
 The Santa Fe Institute, Complexity Explore Web: abm.complexityexploer.org
 Instructors: Bill Rand

Summer school in ‘Complex systems and management’ (July 2-12, 2012)
 National Defense University, P. R. China
 Instructors: Xinjun Mao, Yongfang Liu, Dinghua Shi, Qiyue Cheng