Once apon a time, I was a young man with a fresh degree, and I really liked computers and computing. To play with computers as a job, I started an IT consulting company, almost by accident.

The company was pretty successful and I learned a lot about how the business world works and how technology services are delivered to government. As a sideline and enhancement to our consulting work, we created some successful open source projects (like PostGIS) and helped with others.

The company grew quite large (over 25 staff) and eventually I realized I was spending much of my time on things I found draining (proposals, meetings, organization) and little of it on things I found energizing (technology, computers), so I left the company to work independently.

Working as an independent consultant gave me time to learn new languages, get deeper into open source development, and think about open source. I was invited to join a non-profit open source organization (OpenGeo) and I had a great time there for several years, working with some of the brightest lights in open source geospatial.

The world changed over the years, and the centre of innovation in geospatial shifted from pure-play open source to software-as-a-service (SaaS) start-ups. In 2015, I had an opportunity to work at one of the hottest SaaS companies around, so I seized it, and spent three fruitful years there.

Since 2018, I am working as an Executive Geospatial Engineer at Crunchy Data, providing strategic advice and development on geospatial intelligence to the Fortune 1000 and broad public sector.

As the Response Coordination Lead for NASA’s Disasters Response Coordination System (DRCS), Katie works with the DRCS team, subject matter experts across the Agency, and stakeholders in the emergency management community to develop earth-observation data products that fill information gaps during disasters. Before coming to NASA, Katie held a research position with the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, focusing on applications of remote sensing in disaster response and recovery. Leveraging skills in systems analysis and socio-technical systems engineering, she also supported programs related to food aid delivery, supply chain management, conflict prevention, and other humanitarian missions. Katie previously worked at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), where she helped identify new uses of aerial imagery in emergency management and served as a crowdsourcing unit leader in the National Response Coordination Center.