Kathleen Stewart is Professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences and Director of the Center for Geospatial Information Science. She works in the area of geographic information science with a particular focus on geospatial dynamics. She is interested in mobility and spatial access, often in a big geospatial data context and using approaches that lie in the expanding field of spatial data science. She investigates movement and mobility for a number of different application domains, for example, health and transportation where movement patterns or behaviors and spatial access are key topics. She is also interested in modeling geospatial semantics including geospatial ontologies and their role for location-based applications, and spatiotemporal information retrieval, i.e., computational methods for automatically acquiring meaningful space-time information from text sources. She teaches in the areas of spatiotemporal data modeling, geographic database design, geovisualization and cartography, and fundamentals of geographic information science. At the University of Maryland, Dr. Stewart is a member of the Program in Oncology at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center and also collaborates with researchers at the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health, the Center for Substance Abuse Research, the Maryland Transportation Institute, the School of Public Health, and the Social Data Science Center among others. Her research is supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Federal Highway Administration, and Maryland Department of Natural Resources among other organizations.

Dr. Stewart serves as a member of the Mapping Science Committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. She also serves on the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC). She serves as a steering member of the Maryland Transportation Institute. She is a member of the editorial boards of The International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS), Geographical Analysis, the Journal of Spatial Information Science (JOSIS), the International Journal of Geo-Information and Geomatics. 

She is a steering committee member for the International  Conference on GIScience. She served as a general co-chair for COSIT 2019 held in Regensburg, Germany.