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. Dr. Stewart collaborates with researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health, UMD's Center for Substance Use, Addiction, and Health Research (CESAR), the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology Laboratory (CATT Labs), the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS), 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 National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC), a Federal Advisory Committee sponsored by the Department of the Interior. She served on the Mapping Science Committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (2016-2023). She is a Fellow of the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), and 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 among others. 

She is a past steering committee member for the International  Conference on GIScience and the Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT). She served as a general co-chair for COSIT 2019 held in Regensburg, Germany.