I joined the MPC in 2011 as the Project Manager for Terra Populus (now IPUMS Terra). I now work across all of the aggregate-spatial IPUMS products: Terra, NHGIS, GeoMarker, and managing our newest product, IHGIS (International Historical Geographic Information System, coming in 2020), which will include aggregate data from population and agricultural censuses around the world.
My educational background includes a B.A. in Theater Arts (Stage Management), B.S. and M.S. in Systems Engineering (Systems Modeling and Analysis), and PhD in Geography (GIS and Ecosystem Informatics). The unifying thread that runs through these disparate degrees is an interest in the big picture and how all the pieces of a system fit together and interact with each other. At the MPC, I leverage those skills to develop workflows and processes to bring different types of data together. I have developed workflows for boundary processing that meet requirements for confidentiality and harmonization over time, while providing the greatest possible level of geographic detail. I have also developed workflows for documenting and manipulating highly heterogeneous published census tables to conform to a standard data and metadata structure.