Antonio Medrano

spatial@ucsb Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2015

Antonio Medrano completed his Ph.D. at the UCSB Geography Department in December 2014. At the Center for Spatial Studies, Medrano was a post-doctoral researcher who worked with the UCSB Library to coordinate “discovery” of spatially enabled data within the library. Initial work focused on using linked-data to connect research publications with their associated data sets, particularly focusing on self-deposit data through Esri’s OpenData initiative.

As a Ph.D. student, he partnered with Argonne National Laboratory to research spatial optimization methods for corridor location for new transmission lines. With the increasing development of new renewable energy sources (wind, solar, and geothermal), which tend to be sited in remote locations, Argonne saw a need to improve the geospatial analysis techniques for locating the transmission lines used to deliver the energy from these new sources to consumers. In particular, Medrano developed new algorithms for the difficult computation of sets of spatially diverse of shortest path alternatives and of multi-objective shortest paths, with an emphasis on parallel computing in order to handle problems involving big data. Prior to his doctoral work, Medrano earned an M.S. in Media Arts and Technology (UCSB), and a B.S. in Engineering (Harvey Mudd College).