Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His research is centered on the history of China's cultural elites from the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties. He led Harvard's university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research; in 2005, he was named the first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis. He also directs the China Historical Geographic Information System(GIS)s project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history. In a collaboration between Harvard, Academia Sinica, and Peking University, he directs the China Biographical Database project, an online relational database of 112,000 historical figures currently.