The application for Fall 2025 is now closed. Thank you for your interest.
About UB and the UB Geography Department
The University at Buffalo (UB) is the flagship university in the State University of New York (SUNY) system. It is a leading research university in the United States, and the best public university in New York State. UB is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU) that consists of 69 most research intensive universities in the United States and 2 universities in Canada. UB is the home of five Nobel Laureates, two Pulitzer Prize winters, and many other award-winning scholars. The university has also trained many distinguished alumni, such as Robin Yanhong Li (the founder and CEO of Baidu.com), Wolf Blitzer (Emmy Award-winning journalist for CNN), and C. L. Max Nikias (President of the University of Southern California).
The Department of Geography at UB is a top-10 geography department in the United States. The department is well-known for its significant strength in geographic information science (GIScience), geospatial analysis and modeling, geocomputation, and more recently GeoAI. The Department was one of the three National Centers for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The department has been home to many distinguished GIS pioneers, such as Drs. David Mark, Pete Rogerson, and Hugh Calkins, and has trained a large number of outstanding GIS scholars, such as Drs. Hui Lin, May Yuan, Ming-Hsiang Tsou, Eric Delmelle, Elizabeth Delmelle, Michael Widener, Seth Spielman, Chunyuan Diao, Peter Kedron, Amy Frazier, and many others. The department has a strong alumni network: if you work in the field of GIS, you will run into UB Geography alumni from time to time for sure. The department is also well connected to many other institutes across UB campus, including the UB AI and Data Science Institute and the UB Research and Education Center in eNergy, Environment and Water Institute (RENEW). The PhD program of UB Geography is also a STEM Program. International students graduating from our programs will have a 36-month OPT to seek job opportunities in the U.S.
UB is located in the Buffalo-Niagara region, which is a major metropolitan area with over 1 million population. It is 30 min to the world-famous Niagara Falls, 2 hours to the largest city of Canada, Toronto, and 6 hours from the largest city of the U.S., New York City (NYC). The region is known for its beautiful park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, water fronts to the Great Lakes, four brilliant seasons, and yes, the delicious Buffalo chicken wings. There are many great places for you to explore in Buffalo.