Raj Bhattarai is a geospatial researcher and MS student in the Department of Geography at Virginia Tech.
His research focuses on GeoAI, remote sensing, and urban resilience. He and his advisor, Dr. Fangzheng Lyu, won 1st Place in the NSF-funded I-GUIDE Spatial AI Challenge 2025–26 for their project MURD-ViT: Multimodal Urban Retrofitting Detection with Vision Transformer.