About
Maryam
PhD Candidate in GIScience & Cartography
University of Iowa · Expected December 2026
I am a PhD candidate in GIScience and Cartography at the University of Iowa, working under the supervision of Dr. Caglar Koylu. My research sits at the intersection of spatial data science, computational social science, and historical demography — I study how people have moved and formed communities across the United States using large-scale historical family tree and census data.
Beyond historical GIS, I have contributed to research on groundwater vulnerability, COVID-19 mobility networks, and river water-quality communication. I bring a full-stack spatial skillset — from writing Python pipelines and PostGIS queries to producing publication-quality cartography and interactive web maps.
Focus Areas
Research Interests
Developing population models from family tree and census data to reconstruct historical migration, kinship networks, and settlement patterns in 19th-century United States.
Designing large-scale, reproducible pipelines in Python and PostgreSQL/PostGIS to clean, geocode, and validate historical geographic records at the scale of hundreds of millions of entries.
Mapping community structures in migration and kinship networks using graph algorithms and community detection to understand how social ties shape spatial mobility.
Creating animated, interactive, and print-quality maps with D3.js, ArcGIS, and Observable to communicate complex spatial patterns to academic and public audiences.
Integrating large language models with human-in-the-loop validation workflows to solve ambiguous geographic text interpretation problems at scale.
Using GIS modeling, multi-criteria decision-making, and evolutionary algorithms to evaluate groundwater vulnerability and environmental risk in aquifer systems.
Academic Background
Education
Dec 2026
Sep 2020
Mar 2014
Recognition