My Journey

My path into GIS runs through some unusual terrain. I came to spatial analysis through years of work where geography was never abstract: reconnaissance routes, embassy threat assessments, solar array siting across remote federal land. I kept noticing that the people who understood the landscape had a real advantage over the people who were just reading reports about it. That observation eventually turned into a degree.

At San Diego State University, where I graduated summa cum laude, I focused on environmental systems and geospatial methods: watershed hydrology, terrain analysis, drone photogrammetry, and field data collection. I ran stream cross-section surveys on Alvarado Creek, processed point clouds from UAV flights, and built full-stack web mapping applications handling hundreds of thousands of records. The technical side has grown fast, but the underlying instinct (go look at the place, understand the landscape) comes from the Army.

I'm now pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Geospatial Intelligence Analytics at Penn State, which brings my two careers together. The questions GEOINT asks about activity, patterns, and place are the same ones I worked through on the ground in Iraq and at embassies overseas, and my SIGACTS dashboard, which maps 1.8 million significant activities across Iraq and Afghanistan, is where that interest first took shape in my own work.

I'm particularly interested in applications where spatial data can support land stewardship: watershed management, forest health monitoring, riparian corridor analysis, and conservation planning. These are problems where getting the geography right actually matters, and that's where I want to do my best work.