Yoh Kawano came to Los Angeles and UCLA after living across the globe, in five different countries. At UCLA he works at the GIS and Visualization Sandbox as a member of the Research Technology Group for the Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC), serving as a Lead Computation Scientist for GIS and Spatial Data Science. He has supervised projects in urban planning, emergency preparedness, disaster relief, volunteerism, archaeology, social justice, and the digital humanities. Current research and projects involve the geo-spatial web, visualization of temporal and spatial data, and creating systems that leverage data science methods. In the summer of 2020, Yoh completed the PhD program at UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning, submitting his dissertation titled “Human Error and Human Healing in a Risk Society: The Forgotten Narratives of Fukushima.”

Yoh is on the faculty in both the Urban Planning Department and the Digital Humanities Program. In Urban Planning, he teaches “GIS and Spatial Data Science” in the master’s program, and in the Digital Humanities, he teaches “Introduction to Digital Mapping: Web GIS.”

Yoh has co-authored “Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities”, published in 2014 via Harvard Press. He also directed, produced, and edited “Human Error,” a documentary film that sheds light to the many narratives that percolate the abandoned spaces of Fukushima. Yoh has a PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA and a BA in Sociology from the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo.