Professor of Geographic Information Science and Environmental Geography; Director and Founder, Institute of Geospatial Research and Education (IGRE, from 1998). Professor Xie has long been engaged in geographic information science and remote sensing theory and method research, including spatiotemporal modeling of urban growth, grassland ecosystem, coupled impacts of human dynamics and environmental changes on resource management and ecosystem recovery, and land-use and land-cover changes. Professor Xie is one of the pioneers in the development of urban dynamic evolution theory based on cellular automata.

Professor Xie, in the past 20 years, has applied geo-spatial modeling and remote sensing in the Mongolian Plateau to study coupled impacts of human and natural systems on grassland ecosystems and multi-scale dynamics of the interactions between grazing, ecosystem service, global climate change and socioeconomic transformation. He has developed multi-scale cross-regional and time-series panel models, analyzing a comprehensive set of driving factors, such as, population growth, urbanization process, policy regime, rainfall and climate change, herdsman’s family adaptation strategy, etc., and their interactions, assessing the resilience and vulnerability of grassland ecosystems in the context of global climate and policy changes, and recommending sustainable adaptation strategies. 

Professor Xie is Founding Director, Institute for Geospatial Research and Education (www.emuigre.net). He has served as principal or co-principal investigators over 45 large research projects sponsored by NSF, NASA, NOAA, USEPA, and USGS. A dozen of these grants have the funding amount over half a million dollars each. He is recipient of Distinguished Research Professor of Eastern Michigan University in 2000, Distinguished Scholarship Award from Association of American Geographers Regional Development & Planning Specialty Group in 2004, PI Emeritus Award from US National Science Foundation – ITEST Learning Center in 2010, and Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award at 2016 ESRI International User Conference.