Jan Oliver Wallgrün is a former Penn State researcher at the Department of Geography and GeoVISTA Center who is now working as an independent senior researcher and continues to conduct research in cooperation with several Penn State institutes, such as the Center for Immersive Experiences. He is a computer scientist by training and has been working in the areas of GIS and GIScience education and research for about two decades.

Jan's research focuses on different problems of fundamental GIScience research related to spatial and spatio-temporal modeling and reasoning, the interpretation and processing of human descriptions of spatial knowledge (language or drawings), and algorithmic problems of spatial data integration, matching, and query processing as a basis to build "intelligent" spatial retrieval and assistance systems. His work also involves the application of immersive technologies (virtual and augmented reality) for spatial data analysis and education in different disciplines.

Jan teaches residential and online introductory classes in GIS and GIScience, geospatial data management and spatial databases, web map development, and beginner and advanced classes for Python scripting and object-oriented programming for GIS/GIScience.