The University of Texas Libraries is pleased to announce the 2025 recipients of the Map & Geospatial Collections Explorer Fellowships, which support innovative scholarship drawing on the Libraries’ extensive cartographic and geospatial holdings – including the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) Map Collection, the Geospatial Data Portal and other distinctive resources. Now in its third year, the fellowship continues to highlight the many ways maps, spatial data and archival collections can inform research across disciplines.
The 2025 Faculty/Postdoctoral Fellowship is awarded to Yiming Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Bureau of Economic Geology in the Jackson School of Geosciences. Zhang’s work centers on applying artificial intelligence, machine learning and remote sensing to questions of urban sustainability and resilience. Her fellowship project, “Decadal Monitoring of Colonias with Remote Sensing and Machine Learning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV),” will examine the growth and evolving flood risk of colonias – unincorporated and underserved communities along the Texas–Mexico border – over the past several decades. Drawing on historic FEMA maps, digital scans from the Perry-Castañeda Map Collection, layers from the UT Libraries’ GeoData Portal and high-resolution satellite imagery, Zhang will use AI-enhanced analysis to track spatial change and produce insights that can help inform evidence-based planning and policy development in the region.
The 2025 Student Fellowship goes to Alex Costa Kott, a PhD student in Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at The University of Texas at Austin. Costa Kott researches Afro-Brazilian religions with a focus on Umbanda, its Bantu and Yoruba cosmologies and the social dynamics that shape its contemporary practice. His project, “Mapping Ancestral Geographies: Tracing West & Central African Roots of Umbanda through Historical Cartography,” will explore the African origins of Umbanda by analyzing colonial-era maps from West and Central Africa held in the UT Libraries’ geospatial collections. Using an interdisciplinary approach that blends cartographic, ethnographic and historical methods, and building on the work of scholars such as James Sweet and John Thornton, Costa Kott aims to identify routes, place names and spatial continuities that illuminate the endurance of African cosmologies across the Atlantic world. His research also underscores broader questions of cultural memory and the persistent religious violence targeting practitioners of African-derived traditions in the Americas and the Caribbean.
The Map & Geospatial Collections Explorer Fellowship program reflects the Libraries’ commitment to fostering new scholarship, expanding access to geospatial resources and supporting researchers who bring fresh perspectives to historical and contemporary spatial questions. The Libraries congratulates the 2025 fellows and looks forward to the insights their projects will bring in the year ahead.
Throughout the course of their project development, recipients will have the opportunity present or lead a workshop at a Libraries event to showcase their work. Additionally, project work will be featured in one or more Libraries repositories, enabling long-term preservation and a citable persistent link to project outcomes.
For more information about the Map & Geospatial Collections Explorer Fellowships, visit https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/gis/utl-map-and-geospatial-collection-explorer-fellowship.