Dr. Yin is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Kent State University. Prior to joining KSU in 2020, He was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison and a senior researcher at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn in Germany.
He develops remote sensing approaches and solutions to monitor land use and land cover change, enabling understanding of how such changes affect our environment and society via land system analysis. He is the principal investigator on projects funded by NASA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). His recent projects include investigating the impacts of armed conflict on land use, cropland abandonment, and grassland management using remote sensing, geospatial analysis, and modeling approaches. He has published more than 40 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He currently serves as coordinator of the Global Land Programme (GLP) Working Group "Agricultural Land Abandonment as a Global Land-Use Change Phenomenon". His research has been covered by the media such as Bloomberg and The Hill.