UMSL Chancellor Kristin Sobolik (center) speaks as part of a panel discussion about emerging geospatial careers during the GEONEXT event Tuesday at the Post Building in downtown St. Louis. (Photos by Derik Holtmann)
New career opportunities are arising around the globe every day for people skilled in using geospatial technology and deploying geographic information systems to explain or address challenges.
A growing number of those jobs are concentrated right here in the St. Louis region, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has set the foundation for a burgeoning geospatial sector growing alongside construction of NGA’s new $1.75 billion west campus, which is nearing completion northwest of downtown.
University of Missouri–St. Louis Chancellor Kristin Sobolik joined a panel of industry leaders for a conversation titled “Unlocking Your Geospatial ‘What’ and ‘Why’: A Discussion of The Mind-Blowing and Impactful Careers Your School Counselor Skipped.” It took place last Tuesday morning during the GEONEXT event held at the Post Building in downtown St. Louis as part of STL TechWeek, which aimed to highlight disruptive and emerging technology sectors helping to reshape the St. Louis metropolitan area.
UMSL Chancellor Kristin Sobolik (second from left) joined fellow panelists (from left) Emily Little, Justin Bennett, Carter Christopher and Ian Warner in the event title “Unlocking Your Geospatial ‘What’ and ‘Why’: A Discussion of The Mind-Blowing and Impactful Careers Your School Counselor Skipped.”
With a PhD in anthropology and more than three decades in higher education, Sobolik brought a much different background to the discussion than fellow panelists Justin Bennett, the principal consultant and co-founder of Pinnacle Business Strategies, LLC; Carter Christopher, the division director of the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Emily Little, the chief of Maritime Navigation Asia-Pacific + Data Champion at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; Ian Warner, the director of Industry Workforce Development and Innovation at Trimble; or moderator Jeff Mazur, the director of Government and Industry Partnerships at the Taylor Geospatial Institute.
But Sobolik learned from her early career work in archaeology and anthropology about the importance of tracking historical changes and developments through place and time.
“I used geospatial every single day,” Sobolik said. “When we’re analyzing whether it’s historical or prehistoric, it’s all about space across the world or the Southwest or the Midwest or wherever it is, but also temporally. So, everything I did was geospatial, but we didn’t have all the cool bells and whistles like everybody has now. We had the old tools, but it was still geospatial.”
In her role as chancellor, Sobolik has been helping bring the new technology to faculty and students, pushing for the establishment of UMSL’s Geospatial Collaborative and the development of its Geospatial Advanced Technology Lab while also signing educational partnership and collaborative research and development agreements with NGA.
“My background really helped me try and empower what other people were doing in that research and workforce development realm in geospatial,” she said. “Now I get to empower our students. I get to empower the development of our own Geospatial Collaborative and particularly how we, as one of the institutions that are really helping create this broad-based, fantastic geospatial ecosystem in St. Louis, how we can play our role, and how we can pivot out and make sure that geospatial is used not just for geo-intelligence, which is important, but also all across all the different disciplines that we have at the university.”
A recurring theme of Tuesday’s discussion was how wide the application of geospatial technology and tools can be.
“Just as a glimpse into the range of domains that we have at the Lab that help us be successful as a geospatial science shop, we have electrical engineers, we have applied mathematicians, we have applied statisticians, we have mechanical engineers, cultural anthropologists, spatial demographers,” Christopher said of the people he works with at Oak Ridge. “So, geospatial as a career is highly multidisciplinary in and of itself. It’s not just that you go to school for geography, and that makes you a geospatial person. It’s where you attempt to solve the problems, and if you want to solve in the geospatial vertical, you can be in a geospatial career.”
Added Warner: “We’re starting to get geospatial embedded into almost every career and every facet in the country right now, so hopefully we can keep that pressure up.”
Sobolik acknowledged that more can be done by educational institutions to make students aware of opportunities and pathways into geospatial.
“One of the things about geospatial, as we’ve already indicated, it’s very interdisciplinary,” she said. “One of the things I think that we as educators are doing, both in the K-12 space but also in the higher educational space, is really broadening out skill sets. Be excited about science. Be excited about data. Expose students in those sectors to geography, to science disciplines. We don’t even know what the future is going to be. Just like many of us, many of you sitting out there, you didn’t go into geospatial. I think one of the things that we’re doing collectively a better job at is just understanding how important interdisciplinarity broad thought and thinking are in being prepared for future ideas and future disciplines.”
Bennett is nearing completion of his Doctor of Business Administration at UMSL and is scheduled to defend his dissertation later this month. His research explores why GIS systems and geospatial analysis that customers sought aren’t always adopted, even as they met the criteria those same customers said they wanted.
“I’m focusing on the business side of geospatial,” he said. “I’m at the intersection, ultimately, of empirical evidence that says, ‘Hey, those systems are precise, they have accuracy.’ But I’m putting the human aspect into it and understanding the collaborative research side. I want to understand exactly what is going on, and that’s what I’ve done. I essentially have come to the conclusion, related to empirical evidence, about why we are not adopting these systems.”
UMSL established its Geospatial Collaborative with the aim of engaging with community leaders, policymakers and other partners while deploying geospatial tools to address community problems. The university has also developed new academic programming to help prepare students to meet the growing workforce needs of the region.
