Building Bridges Between Data and Discovery: How a Geospatial Innovator Is Advancing Collaborative Science

By Salami Adeyinka

As the world grows increasingly data driven, one field has quietly emerged as a unifying language across disciplines: geographic information systems (GIS). Once confined to mapping specialists, GIS now powers breakthroughs in everything from epidemiology to environmental science, and at the forefront of this evolution is Basit Amuda, a researcher dedicated to bridging data, disciplines, and discovery.
At Georgia State University, Amuda divides his time between two research centers: the Center for Disaster Informatics and Computational Epidemiology (DICE) and the Center for the Study of the African Diaspora (CSAD). It is an uncommon pairing of public health and history, but for Amuda, it demonstrates how spatial thinking can connect seemingly unrelated worlds.

“When you approach problems through a spatial lens, you start seeing connections that aren’t obvious through traditional analytical methods,” Amuda explains. “Geography isn’t just about where things are. It’s about understanding relationships across space and time.”

That perspective has shaped his push for what he calls spatial thinking across disciplines. By helping computer scientists, public health experts, and geoscientists collaborate through shared spatial data frameworks, he has shown how technology can reveal patterns invisible to siloed research approaches.
At DICE, Amuda’s work focuses on improving data accessibility and analytical efficiency. His creation of interactive ArcGIS Online dashboards has allowed researchers and decision makers to visualize complex datasets in real time, transforming how teams analyze disasters, disease outbreaks, and environmental change. His refinements to SQL queries and PostGIS spatial databases have produced more accurate data and stronger predictive models that help researchers gain deeper insights.

“These improvements aren’t just technical wins,” he says. “They allow scientists to spend less time on data wrangling and more time asking meaningful questions.”

That same philosophy guides his work at CSAD, where Amuda applies GIS to cultural heritage research. His three dimensional reconstruction of a fifteenth century Temne community in Sierra Leone, created using SketchUp, provided scholars with a vivid, spatially grounded perspective on African history. Through ArcGIS story maps and other visualization tools, he has also made academic research more accessible to the public, blending data visualization with storytelling.

Amuda’s responsibilities extend beyond research and visualization. As the web manager for CSAD, he has brought a data driven approach to digital engagement, streamlining content updates, improving site performance, and significantly increasing public interaction with the center’s online resources.

Meanwhile, his time as a Graduate Teaching Assistant honed his ability to communicate complex data concepts to diverse audiences. “Teaching forces you to think about how people learn differently,” he notes. “That’s invaluable when designing tools for stakeholders with varying technical backgrounds.”
Whether developing spatial databases, optimizing cloud workflows, or leading cross departmental collaborations, Amuda’s work reflects a broader mission: to make sophisticated analysis accessible, actionable, and collaborative. His expertise across enterprise GIS platforms, cloud technologies, and visualization tools such as Seaborn and Matplotlib demonstrates a comprehensive understanding of how data science supports scientific progress.

As spatial analytics becomes increasingly central to research innovation, Amuda’s approach offers a glimpse of what the next generation of collaborative science could look like, one where maps are not just visual aids but bridges between knowledge domains.