Elijah Knaap
Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine - School of Social Ecology
La Mesa, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolElijah Knaap is an assistant professor and spatial data scientist specializing in urban planning and public policy, with 11 years of experience studying segregation, neighborhood dynamics, and spatial inequality. He blends methodological innovation and applied analytics—supported by NSF, NIH, HUD and major foundations—to produce reproducible, spatially explicit tools that inform housing, health, and urban policy. Elijah is a core developer for PySAL and QuantEcon and leads geosnap, signaling a rare combination of rigorous academic research and hands-on open-source software engineering. His career spans academic leadership roles at UC Irvine, SDSU, and UCR and practical consulting work, giving him a practitioner’s perspective on translating spatial methods to policy. Outside publications, he has strengthened testing and QA infrastructure in widely used spatial libraries, ensuring reliable analyses for the urban research community.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Maryland, College Park
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (5)
pytest10
python10
testing10
unit-testing9
spatial-analysis8
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
pysal/pysal
Jan 2020 - Jul 2022
PySAL: Python Spatial Analysis Library Meta-Package
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:15 reviews, 26 commits, 5 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Elijah focused on improving the testing infrastructure of the project, as evidenced by modifications to test import configurations. They added and then removed an import of data in the `tobler` module and fixed the `tobler` initialization. This suggests a focus on ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the spatial analysis library. Furthermore, the "test all functions using lazy import structure" commit hints at enhancing testing methodology.
meta-packagepythonspatial-analysispysalspatial
knaaptime/plcc-dashboard
Mar 2016 - Oct 2018
Data dashboard for purple line corridor coalition
Contributions:11 PRs, 13 pushes, 2 branches in 2 years 7 months
data-dashboardpurpledashboard
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.