Mehak Sachdeva

Biography

Mehak Sachdeva earned her doctorate in Geographic Information Science from Arizona State University in 2022. Prior to joining FSU, Mehak was an Urban Science Faculty Fellow at the Center for Urban Science + Progress at NYU and previously held a postdoctoral research position at the Spatial Analysis Research Center at ASU.

Her research develops spatially explicit methods and models to analyze how spatial context and social interactions affect human behavior, choices, and decision-making, especially pertaining to understanding social phenomena such as election outcomes, disease spread, resilience to natural hazard vulnerability, and social dynamics leading to residential choices. Relatedly, her research also delves into the measurement of the spatial extent/scale across which such place-based contextual effects might vary and how such spatial variances could help inform tangible, place-based social policy interventions. Her research hence lies at the intersection of spatial statistics, computational social science, and urban planning and social policy.

Prior to pursuing academia, she had experience working at Carto, a web-mapping software company, and key government organizations such as the New York City Economic Development Cooperation and the New York City Planning Department at Staten Island.

Education

Ph.D. in Geographic Information Science (2018-2022)

School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University

M.S. Urban Planning (2014-2016)

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

Bachelor of Architecture (2008-2013)

Department of Engineering and Technology, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India

Selected Publications

Sachdeva, M., Fotheringham A.S., Li, Z., & Yu, H. (2023). “On the Local Modeling of Count Data:

Multiscale Geographically Weighted Poisson Regression.” International Journal of Geographic Information Science.

Sachdeva, M., & Fotheringham, A.S. (2023). “A Geographical Perspective on Simpson’s Paradox.”

Journal of Spatial Information Science.

Sachdeva, M., Fotheringham, A.S., & Li, Z. (2022) “Do places have value? Quantifying the intrinsic value of housing neighborhoods using MGWR.” Journal of Housing Research.

Fotheringham, A.S., & Sachdeva, M. (2022). “Scale and Local Modeling: New perspectives on the modifiable areal unit problem and Simpson’s Paradox.” Journal of Geographical Systems.

Fotheringham, A.S., & Sachdeva, M. (2022). “On the importance of thinking locally for statistics and society.” Spatial Statistics.