Dr. Kyle Redican

Dr. Kyle Redican is the director of the Spatial Analysis Laboratory in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Sustainability. Kyle is a native Virginian, born and raised in Blacksburg. Kyle earned a B.A. in political science with a minor in history from Christopher Newport University. He completed graduate study at Virginia Tech in urban and regional planning with special emphasis on GIS technologies and statistics. His master’s thesis examined Gigabit broadband penetration and the economic well-being of metropolitan statistical areas. Kyle continued his graduate work in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University. His dissertation was grounded in economic geographic theory and involved exploring the spatial extents and impacts of knowledge spillovers between community water system operators. He was awarded a Ph.D. in May, 2022. Kyle has taught numerous GIS, economic geography, and statistics courses.

Kyle’s expertise lies in applying GIS technologies and spatial statistics to address important geography questions.  Through the development of the tools and methods, his research focuses on the mitigation and assessment of uncertainty in US Census Data; urban sustainability and justice; utility regulation; and AI in geography education.  His research has been published in Sustainability, Telecommunications Policy, the Professional Geographer, Transactions in GIS, Applied Geography, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, among others.  He has published numerous articles with undergraduate students and mentored multiple undergraduate conference poster competition winners (SEDAAG: 2023, 2024; VAMLIS: 2023).  He has conducted applied research projects for multiple cities, including the City of Richmond, as well as numerous professional associations and state and federal agencies.