Shashi Shekhar, a McKnight Distinguished University Professor, a Distinguished University Teaching Professor and an ADC Chair at the University of Minnesota and an U.C. Berkeley alumnus, is a leading scholar of spatial data science and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). He is serving as the Director of a National AI Research Institute, namely, AI-CLIMATE, an Associate Director of his college's Data Science Initiative, a co-Editor-in-Chief of Geo-Informatica journal (Springer), and a general co-chair of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (2024). Earlier, he served as the President of the University Consortium for GIS (UCGIS), and on the Computing Research Association (CRA) board as well as many National Academies' committees including Models of the World for USDOD-NGA (2015), Geo-targeted Disaster Alerts and Warning (2013), Future Work-force for Geospatial Intelligence (2011), Mapping Sciences (2004-2009) and Priorities for GEOINT Research (2004-2005).

His academic record includes 350+ refereed papers, a Spatial Database textbook (Prentice Hall, 2003), an Encyclopedia of GIS (Springer, 2017) and a Spatial Computing (MIT Press 2020) book for professionals. In early 1990s, Shashi's research developed core technologies behind in-vehicle navigation devices as well as web-based routing services, which revolutionized outdoor navigation in urban environment in the recent decade. His research results played a critical role in evacuation route planning for homeland security. He pioneered the research area of spatial data mining via pattern families (e.g., colocation, mixed-drove co-occurrence, cascade, statistically significant linear hotspots, patterns of evasion), keynote speeches, survey papers and workshop organization.

Recognitions include IEEE-CS Technical Achievement Award, UCGIS Education Award, IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow and the Center for Transportation Studies Research Partnership Award for significant impact on transportation. He was also named a key difference-maker for the field of GIS by the most popular GIS textbook.