Jiayan Zhao is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography at Penn State. He received his bachelor’s degree in geological engineering from Central South University (2014) in China and then received his MA in geography from SUNY Albany (2014). He obtained his PhD at Penn State for research on spatial learning in virtual environments under Prof. Alexander Klippel (2020). He is broadly interested in immersive technologies and their application in spatial cognition, wayfinding, earth science data visualization, and place-based education.