Yifang Ban

Dr. Yifang Ban is the Professor and Director of the Division of Geoinformatics at the Department of Urban Planning and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and an Associate Director - Dissemination and Impact at Digital Futures in Stockholm, Sweden. Before joining KTH as a full professor in 2004, Dr. Ban was a tenured Associate Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. She received her PhD in 1996 from the University of Waterloo in Canada.  In 2023, she earned a certificate in Leading Sustainability: High Impact Leadership from the University of Cambridge.

Professor Yifang Ban's research has been focused on Earth observation big data analytics, machine learning/deep learning, and their applications in environmental change monitoring (e.g. urbanization, wildfires, flooding) to support sustainable and resilient development.  She has published extensively on these topics and has been ranked by Stanford/Elsevier among the World's top 2% of scientists in Geological and Geomatics Engineering in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.  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 & ESA), and Climate Change Induced Disaster Management in Africa (funded by EU Erasmus+).

Since 2016, Professor Ban has been an invited expert of the UN Habitat’s Technical Committee on Human Settlements Indicators for the SDGs.  She was also an expert in evaluations of EU and national grant proposals.  She is a co-chair of the ICA Commission on Sensor-Driven Mapping,  a co-lead of the GEO initiative ‘Global Urban Observation and Information’ (2012-2022), an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, and guest editor for several major remote sensing journals, and a scientific committee member of major international remote sensing conferences.