About Jess
Jess worked in agriculture and soil research labs in central Illinois for a decade before pivoting to GIS. While she loved her time performing field work, bench work, and lab management, she was increasingly drawn toward writing scripts and working in the Esri ecosystem, and is happy to support research mostly from behind a computer now. Her favorite coding language is R, her favorite Esri task is wrangling Experience Builder, and she's recently been enjoying learning to build custom React apps.
At U-Spatial, Jess has worked on projects related to ecology, community health, climate change, air pollution, and a variety of other subjects. She's an extremely curious person, both about the answers to questions and about which questions are the most interesting to ask, and appreciates that at U-Spatial she gets to explore so many corners of geographic data and constantly expand her skill sets.
Key Projects and Initiatives
The Healthy Community Data Portal
This national database includes quantifiable measures and variables of health concerns at different geographic scales, which may be linked to health and clinical data. The portal allows researchers, community members, policymakers, and others to promote positive health outcomes for all individuals across the United States.
The VA Air Quality Project
This project linked Veterans Affairs (VA) mortality data with pollution measures, census data, social indices, and other metrics to explore environmental exposures as a key driver of lung disease.
We Are Waters
This traveling exhibit deepens community connection to water, in part through large (several feet tall) maps created by U-Spatial to highlight local water features for each location.
Areas of Expertise
- Designing custom databases, building CKAN data portals, and developing API integrations for web mapping applications.
- Analyzing greenhouse gas emissions, forest carbon lifecycles, and solid dynamics using spatial statistics and scripting.
- Integrating complex mortality datasets with environmental pollution and socio-demographic metrics to study disease drivers.
- Transforming spatial research into interactive ArcGIS Experience Builders and dashboards for policymakers, researchers, and the public.
Work with Jess
Reach out, consultations are free for the U of M community.