23 Young Geospatial Professionals to Watch in 2023 – 4 of 23
Name: Lauren McKinney-Wise
Companies: Portland Bureau of Transportation Current
Positions: Graduate Assistant, GIS Lab Coordinator/Lead GIS tutor
Age: 29
Education: GIS certificate, AS Portland Community College; BS in Geography with minor in GIS Portland State University; MS in Geography, Portland State University
Biography: McKinney-Wise works tirelessly to support her geospatial community and never turns down an opportunity to expand her GIS skills or to help others expand theirs. She cares deeply about continuously improving and learning within the world of GIS as well as sharing all the opportunities that GIS has to offer with the greater public. Lauren feels that GIS can and should be used by everyone, and her body of work reflects this.
As a student at Portland State University she worked on several projects, including the GIS-Mapping Exchange and the Oregon Connectivity and Assessment Project. For the GME, she taught public reference librarians how to make maps and how to make GIS accessible to library patrons. For the OCAMP project, she conducted complex raster analyses to determine potential pathways of movement for more than 50 Oregon species. McKinney-Wise is GIS head tutor and assists with GIS lab curriculum and coordination at Portland Community College.
When she isn’t working, she is volunteering for her local and national GIS community. For the past five years, she has participated in the Cascadia Region American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) student chapter and the national ASPRS Student Advisory Council. During this time, she assisted in putting on events and conferences such as the Portland Cartography Symposium, GIS in Action, and GIS for Activism. This year, McKinney-Wise presented at GIS for Activism, GIS in Action, the ASPRS virtual conference, and the Public Library Association conference. She loves to make maps and had several maps published in a new book Upper Left Cities: A Cultural Atlas of San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, and has published several scholarly articles.
