Writing & Teaching
I write and teach about geospatial work as institutional practice — how spatial data systems get built, governed, and used to support real decisions inside complex organizations. Most of the field is taught as technique. The harder and more important questions are organizational: who owns the data, who pays for the program, how it survives leadership changes, and how it earns the trust of the people whose decisions it supports
Leadership & Institutional Practice
Geospatial Professional Network
GIS Leadership Academy instructor for the strategic planning module of GPN's flagship leadership program — the only program of its kind in the field. The module covers program justification, organizational alignment, financial sustainability, and long-term positioning. [Link]
To Be a Geospatial Leader, Go Beyond the Technical
ArcNews, Spring 2023. On why technical skill alone doesn't produce institutional leaders, and what the URISA GIS Leadership Academy is doing about it. [Link]
GIS Program Success Factors Workshop
Carolina GPN, NCGIS Pre-conference Workshop, 2024. A working session on the organizational, financial, and leadership conditions that determine whether institutional GIS programs survive.
Spatial Decision Making Under Pressure
South Carolina National Guard Uses GIS to Guide COVID-19 Missions
Esri Blog, January 2021. A feature on the decision system I helped build for the SC National Guard's pandemic response — over 300 consecutive days of statewide coordination across testing, vaccination, hospital capacity, and resource deployment. [Link]
Geospatial Decision Making: The SC National Guard Data-Driven COVID-19 Response
Esri User Conference, 2021 · with Christy Jacobs A presentation on the analytical methods that supported the response — site suitability analysis, space-time pattern detection, predictive modeling. [Link]
Teaching
University of South Carolina, Department of Geography, 2024–Present
GEOG 310: Web GIS Studio — A project-based course built around real institutional problems. Students work with actual university data and operational challenges rather than synthetic exercises. Contemporary GIS is web GIS, and the course is designed around that reality.
GEOG 105: The Digital Earth — An introduction to how geographic data is collected, visualized, and analyzed digitally. The course features industry guest speakers and visits to the university's special collections to examine historical cartographic materials.
Western Michigan University, Department of Geography, 2018–2019
Graduate Teaching Assistant for Remote Sensing of the Environment, Geodatabase Design and GIS Workflows, and Introduction to Geospatial Technologies.