Hiya and welcome! I'm a Geospatial Data Specialist, and I've developed this webpage to introduce myself and show off some of my work. My academic and professional career have been built around 3 questions:
1) Where are people going?
2) How can they get there?
3) How do societal and environmental factors impact their trip and vice versa?
I consider myself to have four areas of professional interest: Maps, Data, Transportation, and Climate. At some point in my life, each of these things has presented a way for me to think about or answer my three root questions above. I am first and foremost a map person. Seeing how physical locations of people, items, data, etc. relate to each other just really does it for me. I’ve known this since I was old enough to read a map. I navigated family road trips starting at age 8. My Christmas and birthday presents often consisted (and still do) of various maps and atlases. And most notably, I was obsessed with the weather segments of the news; I call these gateway maps. They’re unintimidating. They’re ubiquitous. And they’re useful. I’m convinced everyone has familiarized themselves with at least one random small town or neighborhood near their home that they’ve never been to simply because they saw it on a weather map every day.
My first college major – and, in fact, my main criteria for picking a college – was Meteorology. Growing up in the Tampa area in Florida, the 2004 hurricane season was both fascinating to follow and terrifying to experience. It inspired me to learn how the weather works, and increasingly, why it’s becoming more extreme. I love the practicality of meteorology, having an immediate and constant impact on people’s day. I also loved the math and science of weather and climate. The mathematical frameworks and scientific theories I gained from studying Meteorology provided me with the basics for the data analytics I use in pursuing my other interests. And that practicality of weather has given me a great starting topic when meeting new people – who never seem to care about it quite as much as I do.
Eventually, as I grew into my teens and became more independent, a second thing started to jump out of those weather maps: the roads! I could see all these cities on the map and wondered how I could get to the coldest one (Yes, I’m an Ice Queen). I also started to notice how the road networks differed from city to city and changed between urban and suburban areas. But knowing the route to get somewhere was not my biggest problem; it was accessing a mode of transportation to travel that route. I'll note here that I grew up in exurban parts of the Tampa metro – it took 30-45 minutes to get to school and 15 minutes to DRIVE to the nearest grocery store. There were no sidewalks, bike infrastructure, or bus routes to use which meant I was reliant on others to go to a bike trail, a store, or a friend’s house.
As a self-reliant individual, I did not do well with my exurban isolation. I remember as a high schooler knowing that any job I got, I wanted it to be in the downtown of a city. That quintessential urban environment was synonymous with freedom and opportunity in my mind. And adding a Geography major to my undergraduate work provided me with an opportunity to understand why I made that association. Exploring concepts like walkability, urban form and design, and multi-modal transportation networks allowed me to dissect why certain places offer more mobility than others. This was also my introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which provided a new way for me to engage my passion for maps which I explored both in undergraduate coursework and several internships.
In Grad School at the University of Georgia, I worked with ways to combine my historical passion for weather with my new passion for transportation systems, studying climate’s impacts on American transportation systems. GIS is a great tool for investigating the relationship between climate and transportation, and as a result, I deepened my familiarity with GIS raster and vector analysis. I’ve now worked or interned as a GIS analyst or worked closely with GIS as a Transportation planner in 8 different positions over 11 years (2013 – 2024) in areas such as wildlife conservation, energy distribution, climate analysis, local government and infrastructure management, Environmental Planning, and Transportation Planning. In the last few years, I’ve been solely responsible for the GIS needs of my department with no day-to-day technical guidance or assistance. I feel confident in teaching myself new things and applying GIS to the needs of my work. This dynamic has also given me space to work more with automation, database design and management, and coding data pipelines and solutions for various analytical needs.
I also have a life outside of work – yes, that life still involves a lot of maps. My number one favorite activity is exiting my apartment in Brooklyn and walking till I drop (usually not literally). It’s a great way to study urban design, get to know a neighborhood, and get some personal time. Sometimes I fly to other cities and do the same thing, making sure to also try some good lattes and bread at various bakeries in those cities. The travel is particularly special to me as I’ve started heading to farther places. I love languages - a very tangible component of culture. I enjoy finding connections between different languages with related vocabulary or grammar structures. It’s a way of building bridges between places and understanding common histories.
Maps form the core of my professional life. I understand the world through the lens of space and always use a spatial context in my critical and analytical processes. The artistry of cartography gave me an opening to a career in mapping: making maps aesthetically pleasing and using them to convey a message. However, as my career has evolved, my interest has shifted towards the data behind the map – involving the collection and organization of data through data pipelines, as well as deriving value from it through data analysis.
Since 2013, I've worked with GIS software in applications for local government, conservation, utility network management, climatology, and urban planning. My map gallery reflects the diversity of these applications and my competency with GIS in many contexts. As my focus has shifted to more technical work, I’ve developed proficiencies in complimentary skills like python and SQL.
A lot of my python and SQL projects - most notably my census data collection tool - began as a way to either collect or analyze data I needed for maps. I enjoy the structure and organization that databases provide, and SQL has been my key to employing databases like PostgreSQL and PostGIS in my mapping workflows. Similarly, Python has empowered me to better harness spatial data using libraries such as BeautifulSoup and Selenium for web scraping, Pandas and SciKitLearn for data engineering, and ArcPy and GeoPandas for automating geoprocesses and cartography.
In many ways, we’re very lucky to live in a time when data is increasingly an unlimited resource. The challenge of our time is becoming less about collecting data and more about creating tools to explore and analyzing it. In my own work, I’ve used my educational background in Math and Science as a basis to learn tools such Python, SQL, MS Excel, and PowerBI and to familiarize myself with certain powerful datasets such as census data, transportation models, and NOAA climate data.
While I have taken formal classes in Python and SQL, I was originally self-taught. I have also taught myself HTML and Javascript to build this website and several other data visualization and analysis tools. I enjoy learning new tech and figuring out how to put tools together in new ways. Using Python I’ve made maps and graphs, created geographic analysis tools, formatted, organized and manipulated large datasets, processed PDF digital field work data collection forms, created this website and other user interfaces, and much more. While SQL is much less extensible, I derive a lot of satisfaction from organizing and analyzing data in software like PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and MS Access. There’s a weird pleasure in running a selection query summarizing ridership or demographic data and simply answering big questions. Geographic SQL databases like PostGIS and SQL Server have the added benefit of simplifying geographic analyses and considering geographic datasets in new ways.
Certain datasets have become especially important to me because of their frequent use both in my professional work and personal projects. I have become somewhat of an expert in US Census data (including CTTP data) with a firm understanding of the geographies the bureau uses, the types of statistics that are available for each geography, and the schedule of data releases for different surveys. Recently, I’ve started exploring other countries’ comparable datasets for future projects. Certain transportation models like the Replica datasets, and NOAA’s climate normal and statistics are also favorites of mine that I’ve used repeatedly.
Examining people's use of space is one of my favorite applications of mapping and data analysis. For me, transportation is about providing access to place and space in the most sustainable way with regard to both our physical and social environment. How a transportation network impacts intersecting spaces and vice versa is one way of informing our understanding of and solutions to a variety of problems from housing affordability and education access to deforestation and water quality.
Some impacts of transportation are straight forward and easy to digest. Certain forms of transportation release toxic particles such as PM2.5s and Ozone which degrade air quality. Noise and light pollution from airports, highways, and rail lines disrupt natural habitats or reduce land values. Other impacts require more thought. The way limited-access highways disrupt communities by destroying functional street grids. Or the impacts of increased traffic on food prices and the efficiency of emergency services. I enjoy working with the complexities of both passenger and freight transport and consider transportation systems to be a crucial reference point for understanding larger societal problems.
As Climate Change increasingly asserts itself in our daily lives, the world is finally understanding that the relationship between climate and human activity is precarious. But while our effect on climate is rightly gaining attention, we can’t forget how limited our knowledge still is of the ways our historical and present climate impacts our lives. This isn't separate or distinct from climate change, but it does focus on a complex web of factors beyond carbon release and absorption.
As we work to prevent further warming of Earth's atmosphere, we must acknowledge that it's too late to avoid, in totality, the effects of our changing climate in the coming year. I want to help ensure we understand how our historical and present climate affects our social and physical infrastructure. That understanding will be necessary to better prepare for a future climate that may be far less hospitable - or at least far less familiar - to us than the one in which we have historically planned our lives and infrastructure.
Tell me who you are and how to respond to you. Then let me know what I could do for you and what kind of problems we could collaborate on.