Be black. Be black. Be bold. Bold. Be innovative. Show the world equitable gl. We're coming together as a collective to celebrate people of African descent, the diaspora, and talking about geospatial equity and justice. You're listening to the North Star Gaze, a podcast with intimate stories from GL luminaries.

 Welcome back to another episode of the North Star Gaze. I'm excited to kick off this quarter when we will be focusing on women in GIS, and I'm particularly excited to have Eva Reid as my co-host for this quarter. Eva's the program manager for Geospatial Solutions and Analytics at DewBerry, which is based in Fairfax, Virginia.

You can't see her, but I will tell you, she looks quite young, even though she has over 30 years of experience in geospatial technology and data management.   Eva was a keynote speaker at the most recent North Star of GIS annual conference. She's a really sought after speaker, panelist and moderator in this field, and I am, just so grateful that she has agreed to. Be my co-host for this segment. So I met Eva when she was with the DC Department of Health. I was with Esri at the time and I knew that she was also doing work bringing together women who work in GIS.   She had also worked for the DC Office of the Chief Technology Officer, so she's got a long history in the public sector. Now she's in the private sector and we're gonna ask her some questions about that as well. But Eva, welcome and thank you so much for being here today.

I really appreciate your making time. 

It is absolutely my pleasure. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much. 

Now, I've heard you talk a little bit about this, but I'm gonna ask you for our audience to, talk a little bit about your journey into geospatial work because you, you're a little bit unique in this respect.

So can you talk a little bit about what first drew you to GIS? 

Sure. I have to always start with being. About five years old. So I come to GIS from just a very long history of loving maps. As a 5-year-old, I was not really good at staying still, uh, premonitions or foreshadowing of the future. But, I.

Basically spent most of what was supposed to be nap time in kindergarten, making maps of imaginary places with my best friend at the time. And so we would kind of hide in the back of the room on our little blankets and we would draw. For the entire time. So that was five years old. Fast forward to about seven and my uncle sent me a subscription to National Geographic I for my birthday or Christmas or something, and I absolutely loved it.

The thing was that unlike, I think most people, I. Was interested in the maps. Yes, the pictures were wonderful. The stories I think were a little bit ahead of where I was, sort of intellectually, but, um, I was most interested in the maps. And so anytime there was a map that came out in the magazine, that was the first thing I went to and I would open it up and I would lay it on the floor and I would just spend hours pouring over the maps.

So that was age seven. And then fast forward, in school loving computers. It was the eighties, so computers were a big deal or becoming a big deal. And then fast forward again to college, and I started out as an environmental science major, thinking that I was going to save the world through biology.

And I took my first biology class and realized that that was not what I was gonna be doing. I loved the subject, but it just wasn't the. I don't even know how to explain it. It just wasn't for me. So I spent some time in college just really exploring what the possibilities were and needed to complete my natural science credits and found physical geography.

And that was the end of trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I was a geography major from that point on. And then when I realized I could take cartography, I may have lost my mind a little bit. Um, I was very excited, so I took all the cartography options and then I found out that I could. Since I had done the cartography classes, there was this thing called GIS and we had one class and I said, okay, I'm gonna take this and I'll see what this is about.

I figure it's computers and it's maps and it's all the things that I really enjoy. So let's try it out. And really, that was, that was, I think. My maybe second semester sophomore year, might have been first semester junior, but anyway, it was sort of later in my college career and I literally just never looked back from that.

I took the class, did okay in the class, um, and then found an internship. And I found my internship at Minnesota Planning, and that was it. So I think 1995 was really when I started doing GIS. I learned everything on the job pretty much. Um, and just, 

And that was in Arizona? 

No, that was in Minnesota.

Oh. So I did my undergraduate at, McAllister College in St. Paul, Minnesota. And we had a geography department, which is, was then and still is probably even now less, less of a common thing. But it was not a common program at a small liberal arts college.

And so it was not common to have a geography department. Having a computer lab was a big deal. Okay. We mostly had computers that were not capable of doing a whole lot. So I think I, my first experience with GIS was grass, which is a RA based GIS program. Most, most people in the field know about it still exists today as far as I know.

I think people still actually use it. But that was it. That was my first experience. And um, when I started my internship, we were using. Arc Info, Esri's arc info on sun workstations. I think it was Arc Info seven. And I literally learned all of that on the job. Had a great experience at what is, well, what used to be the Land Management Information Center for the State of Minnesota and then became Min Geo, Minnesota Geo, which now does a lot of really great work

it was just such a great learning experience. I had the opportunity to go back to Minnesota a couple years ago and keynote at the Minnesota G-I-S-L-A-S conference and got to see my advisor who helped me to get the internship one of the guys that was effectively one of my bosses at Gio and got to see a whole bunch of other people that I knew from.

Back in the day. So, um, really just a really great experience and again, learned everything on the job. Took that and kind of ran with it and that was the beginning of my career, truly. I ended up working, then moving to Arizona. Long story short, needed a job the director of the Land Management Information Center, knew the state cartographer in Arizona, and so David Arbit from Minnesota sent a letter to Gene Troia in Arizona and said, if you have a position open, you should consider hiring this person.

Right. 

So that was really the introduction to my, you know, professional career as a geospatial professional. 

Now I'm going to say over my many years working with geographic systems and geographic information, you are only the second person that I've met who was that intentional about having a career.

Most of the people that I've encountered kind of happened into it without that sense of intention of this is where I want to be. So it's really, it's kind of fascinating to speak with you about. That the other way that I find people getting into this work, and I, I had this conversation just yesterday with somebody because the first time I heard it, to be honest, I was skeptical.

But many of the people that I encounter who are working in GIS are doing it because they really want to make the world a better place. And I hear you did both things, right? You were setting out to make the world a better place and you were deeply interested in geography and cartography, but was there a moment in your career when you realized that GIS could actually be a way of helping to make the world a better place and can you talk about that?

To be quite frank, I think I knew pretty early on that this was something that had the potential. Not to do great things. 'cause obviously humans are the ones doing the great things, but it really had the potential to support greatness. And it sounds a little silly when I say that. I hear myself say that and I think to myself, yeah, Eva, okay, that's kind of ridiculous.

But I think it's true. And I will say that as an intern, you get to work on a lot of different projects and. I think that showed me, and I don't think I would've been able to articulate it then, but that showed me that you could do a lot of different things. I think my interest in volunteering and then my work in GIS and then some other things that I was doing as a student, I think that really showed me.

There was this potential for doing great things with this tool. And so I think the actual time that I said, oh my gosh, was actually later. So I had this sort of seed planted as an intern and I think I really realized once I came to dc, quite frankly, so quite a bit later in my career.

That this can do amazing things for people. And it was one of the things that helped me to realize that I wanted to be in government and that I wanted to do things to help residents of, whatever jurisdiction I happened to be working in at the time. And I saw the value. I think the other thing that really helped to cement that for me was actually teaching other people to use the software.

So , even before I was in the district, I worked for the Arizona Department of Transportation for a number of years, and my manager at that point had me come to support the classes that she was teaching, and so I had some experience. Teaching people and, and seeing what things people were doing and, and how they wanted to use GIS.

And I think that really was then sort of the second round of realizing what the impact could be and what the impact already was. So then I come to DC and I'm working. Primarily as a trainer at that point. 'cause I'd had years and years of being an analyst and then realizing, you know, I'm getting all these people from Department of Transportation, department of Health, um, public Works, department of the environment, all these different agencies doing different things and, and with different missions.

But the coordinating mission being. Making the city a better place for residents. And that's not an official mission or anything, but I think that was sort of the cohesive mission that we all had in the back of our heads and realizing, all these people are doing different things, but this tool is beneficial to everybody.

And I think that's really when it cemented for me and I said, this is why we're all doing this. This is why we're using this tool. So it was a lot of things, but ultimately it was just seeing the breadth of things that people are doing, we're doing and are continuing to do.

So you've made this transition from the public sector into the private sector, and for people who are not familiar with DewBerry, can you talk a little bit about what you're working on there and, and the things that you're jazzed about.

Absolutely. So DewBerry is, traditional architecture, engineering, construction firm. And so we do all of those things. We have architects, we have planners, we have engineers, construction folks, and we have a whole geospatial team. DewBerry has been around for about 70 years and, of those 70 years, DewBerry has been doing GIS for about 50.

So it's, DewBerry has a long history of geospatial. 

Really? Wow. 

Yeah. I knew of DewBerry and I knew DewBerry had been doing. GIS for a long time, but I didn't realize how long until I started working here. DewBerry has an excellent reputation in the field. I knew about it. From, many years before I came to work here.

So we do a lot of different things in geospatial. We have an entire remote sensing team. We actually collect, process, QC and deliver remote sensing data, primarily lidar, my team is GIS and analytics. So we do everything from data development to application development to analytics, to actually implementing infrastructure.

So we really do all of the things. I'm a manager and I manage a program, so I'm, I am not as hands-on as I used to be, but I get to see. And have my hands in projects, all of our projects to some degree. So it's just a very interesting, change, I guess I would say from public sector where I was doing more hands-on, although I was starting to get into management already.

And then when I was at Health, I was managing a program. But now it's truly, I am in GIS managing the program and really. Trying to help shape what we do. 

One of the other ways in which you and I have encountered each other is because you run the DC chapter of women in GIS, which is awesome.

I've just attended one of your, uh, uh, happy hour events a couple of weeks ago, and I should tell you, I had a conference call with one of the people who attended just last night. 

Fantastic. 

So if you are a woman in GIS in the DC area listening to this. Podcast, I urge you to look online for women in GIS look for Eva Reid, um, and come on out for one of the events.

It's a great networking opportunity. Okay. Sorry for the plug. Let me get back to the question, but my plug relates to the next question because I wanna ask you about what you are seeing for. Opportunities in particular for women in GIS because I still experience this. You go to the GIS conferences and the people on the stage, um, are primarily men in my experience, and, uh, primarily not people of color.

So what are you seeing as opportunities and places where women can begin to get in and how are you finding the opportunities changing or are you finding them changing? 

That is such a good question. So the answer to that is kind of multi-part. So I started what is now affiliated with women in GIS, the organization.

I started DC women in GIS with two other women. We literally had lunch one day and at lunch. Having great conversation about many, many things, but sort of looked at each other and said, why are, why is this not happening? Why do we not see other women in the field? And it's not to say that we weren't working with other women, but just as you said, the ratio was just way off kilter.

So for every, you know, I don't know what the actual ratio is, but for every say, you know. 10 men, maybe one woman in the room. Yeah. I worked on a team of, at one time, 20 people. There were three women, 

yeah. 

And one of them actually was an admin, so she wasn't even doing GIS. So we were all experiencing this and we decided, hey, why don't we just invite some of our friends and people we know, women that we know in the field, and why don't we just get together periodically?

So we sent out an email and said, Hey, let's get together. And so that was in 2012, I believe. And we just keep meeting. Because why not? Um, it has changed. We are seeing more women in the field. We are seeing more women in management positions. I am not, yes, executive positions as well, but I think that's sort of another category, maybe. . We're seeing more. We're not there. We're not at parity. It's not 50 50. If you look at the population of women in general, we're 51, I think it's still 51% of the population. We are not that in geospatial. And then if you start to look at women of color, uh, other underserved populations, we are not.

There we, the equivalent is not there. So, it has changed and it has changed a lot. If you just look at some simple measures like what is the line for the bathroom at a conference look like, you know, it used to be you could go to a GIS conference and as a woman you never had to wait online because there weren't that many.

It was maybe five of us. Again, not using real numbers, but. Now I go to a conference and I have to wait, and the line 

is 

really long. So, 

okay, this is one time I'm actually happy about that line. It's unjust. And when we rule the world, there will be many, many, many more stalls for women than men. But this is a, that's a great metric for change in the industry.

We all know, right? We've all been there. What I do think though is we're still missing out on some things like women. Typically are the caregivers. I'm not saying all women, I'm not saying that's true of every family, but women tend to be the caregivers, whether you're talking, children or you're talking elderly.

I don't have children, but I have an elderly mother, so I'm thinking about that when I go to a conference. Is my mom going to be taken care of? Are my friend's children? Do they have someone to take care of them while, mom is at a conference? And so I'm still not seeing very few exceptions.

I think a, a g is one that does offer childcare, for example. I know that some conference have tried to do that in the past, but quite frankly, that has not changed very much. So if you are a woman in the field and you have children or you're taking care of parents. There is not that resource that does not exist in the way it might in some other spaces.

And so I think that is a change that needs to happen. We are less likely to go to conferences if we don't have childcare. Or elder care. I think there are other things like that as well that haven't really changed. And I would like to see that change in my lifetime. I think it easily could.

The mechanisms are there. I know a woman who actually runs a business. Her whole point of the business is to provide childcare at tech events, love it. Let's that a thing. 

Obviously that should be, it should be a thing, but until it's a thing, thing, what a brilliant idea.

I'm gonna, ask a question that is not something that I thought I would ask about, but you, as you were talking about your mom and I know you have a close relationship with your mom 'cause I hear you talk about her, but recently I heard you mention your father and his, outgoing personality.

Who was Dr. Reid? 

Dr. Reid was an awesome guy. Um, and he passed away a number of years ago, so pardon me for being a little emotional about it. My mom and my dad were my first champions, is what I would say. My dad. Was a first generation American. His parents were from Jamaica, so that's where my half of the family hails from.

My dad was the first, he had two brothers. , They were all the first generation to go to college. They all ended up with advanced degrees, not an easy thing to do. When you were born in 1931 he was really, just an outgoing, very generous of heart he's a very generous person, but generous of heart I think was the most important piece.

And he really, just in doing what he would normally do every day would show me that it's important to be connected to your community. Community is. Everything maybe with a little e. It is also how we get to where we wanna be in the worlds. I am where I am now because I have multiple communities around me that support me.

My dad. Had community around him, as a, again, as a first generation American, as a first generation college student. And, you know, quite frankly, my family was poor. My dad's family was poor. My mom's family was poor. It wasn't to say that they weren't educated. They were, but there were not a lot of opportunities just kind of, you know, waiting for them.

They had to really make an effort to. Find community that would support them. And they did. And my dad did the same thing. I was able to go to the schools that I was able to go to because of my community. And I'm grateful that my parents did, you know, achieve sort of middle class. Whatever.

So that certainly helped me to do the things that I wanted to do, but really it's about community. And so I learned that from my dad and I have kind of carried that forward and that really has informed, much of what I do now. 

I'm so glad I asked the question. My apology for going off script, but it gives me another point of understanding who you are and amazingly I met Eva over 10 years ago, but it's only recently I'm realizing how many things we have in common.

We're both native New Yorkers. My father too was first generation. Born in the states of West Indian parents, so we've got lots of 

connection. 

You've talked a little bit about mentorship, but what I wanna turn the conversation now to ask, about young women in particular entering into this world and what skill sets do you think they should be trying to develop in order to get involved in this industry?

Yeah, so I think the first thing I would say is. What we call soft skills. I call them critical skills 'cause you can't do anything else without being able to communicate. I think that's one of the most important things. And so anytime as a young person, you have the opportunity to develop your communication skills.

I think that's, that's first and foremost. Obviously we're here to talk about geospatial, so then, you know, thinking about you want to. Have conceptual knowledge of GIS and geography. You need to know the basics. You need to know things like the, the locations. Are closer to each other, are more similar than the locations that are further apart.

So you need to know things like that. And then obviously you need to be comfortable with software. You need to be comfortable with sitting at a computer and you know. Firing up the GIS software, whatever software it is, and using that to do analysis and, you know, site suitability and all these different things, model modeling and whatever else you might be doing.

So I think really the, the critical skills first are you, you know, can you communicate? How do you put together? A map and, and, and then also be able to explain what that map is showing. Um, how do you write a report. Those kinds of things are really important and I think they get short shrift when we talk about getting into GIS.

You know, I'm chuckling a little bit because one of the things that I see is sometimes people get so excited about making pretty maps. Mm-hmm. That they don't always know how to do. That last thing you talked about, like, what does this all mean? Right? Mm-hmm. That may be physically a beautiful map. It looks gorgeous.

Is it helping somebody to understand something that is going on or not? Or is it just a pretty. Right. You can Exactly. You can make it pretty and you can make it informative. Um, and we're seeing so much technology change and I guess where I wanna head now. I am not hands on in the industry at this point, but I'm hearing about things like Geo ai and you talked about remote sensing.

Mm-hmm. Um, what are you excited about and what are you seeing as emerging technologies and emerging capabilities? 

So many things. It's funny, so AI is obviously ai, geo ai, however you wanna spin it obviously is very the IT thing these days. I honestly, yes, it is important. We need to understand it.

We need to see how it works with geospatial. For me, however, I think the integrations is where it's at. Integrations with third party tools. So let's say I'm using my GIS software and I, you know, if I were a, let's say I was still with the District of Columbia, I'm probably having to integrate with various other software. And so I think that's one of the things that has been and will continue only and only get greater. I think it will just continue to be a really important part of what we do. So understanding things like APIs and you know, how other software's work, things like, um, we're doing a lot of work these days with, automation, so.

Automation tools are really important. If you are doing the work you need to be able to not only do the work, but then you're also, as I sort of mentioned before, you know you're writing reports and doing other things. So most people these days aren't just sitting at the computer and. Making maps or analyzing data, they are doing that.

And then they are also taking that into, Hey, we've gotta create dashboards. We have to write the reports that go to, the constituents and all these different things. So I really think. Having the ability to both physically connect the software with these other tools, but then also as a human be able to understand how all these things connect together.

I think those are just. Have been and will continue and only become more important because the different software that we use almost doesn't even matter. You know, is it Esri, is it Qis? Is it, uh, verus, is it whatever? That doesn't matter. It's always gonna be something. There's always gonna be something new and we have to at least understand the underpinnings of all of this so that we can, when you know super fancy product A comes out, how do we interact with that?

How do we as geospatial people? And then how do we as the managers of the software actually interact with these other things. It's constantly changing, and so I really see that as if you're going to be a geospatial person long term, you are going to have to be flexible and you are gonna have to be able to think around all of this.

How do we work with these other tools? How does the geospatial integrate with that? 

I think that boils down to flexibility and resilience, right? Yes. And in a changing environment, you need to be able to pivot. Yes. But how are, you keeping yourself educated about changes in the environment?

In the environment, the geospatial environment? 

An excellent question. I think really it's. Attending conferences whenever possible if, even if you can't attend the full conference, if you have the opportunity to watch whatever recorded pieces of the conference are available. I do this women in GIS group and we meet monthly.

I think that's really important. It doesn't have to be women in gs. I mean, of course I'm encouraging people to join, and not even join, like, it's not about joining the organization, but participate, I guess is what I would say participate in. Groups that are affiliated with geospatial in some way, because talking to people, word of mouth is really one of the best ways to keep the pulse on what's happening.

If I were to attend a ton of conferences and then just sit in my room the rest of the time, I wouldn't be learning. I'd sort of be absorbing information but not really learning. Um. It's not to say that conferences aren't great. They are. They're absolutely critical, but talking to people is also really important.

Yeah, 

I am very lucky and grateful to be able to, give talks at conferences, but I think that also helps me because I have to be up on, kind of what's going on and how do I go and give a keynote? How do I make that relevant to the people at the conference?

That helps me stay involved. So I'm not here trying to tell people, go keynote at a conference or anything like that. But, do a presentation in your office. Give a presentation to a a Girl Scouts or Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts group. Volunteer. 

Volunteer to do something for GIS day.

Put your hand up and do the work. Even if the work is learning so that you can share with other people. I think that's so important. And really, you've done two things at one time. You've educated yourself and given yourself an opportunity to kind of get yourself out there also.

So I guess that's two things already. And then a third thing would be that you are sharing with your community and you're helping other people to become aware of what is out there. 

So we just finished the quarter on, environmental Justice and GIS We are kicking off the quarter on women in GIS.

We've got several, interviews coming up. What do you hope listeners will take away from the series on women in GIS? 

I think the thing that I hope most of all is that people listening to the podcast see themselves in us. 

Hmm. 

I hope that they take away, and I haven't explicitly said this, so to explicitly say this, I hope that people realize that.

You know, you are only limited by your imagination. What you can do yourself and what you can do with the software is really just a matter of, I'm interested in this thing. I would like to try to do X, is there a way that I can do this? Is there a way that I can get the software to help support me in doing that?

I love it. 

So , I said earlier, you know, DewBerry, a typical a EC company, we're not typical in a lot of ways. I think there is an opportunity here, which I really appreciate to do the work of seeing where we could go with GIS software. With a particular type of analysis.

So I would hope that people would hear me and hear the other women that we will be talking to and hear what they've been doing and what they hope to do, and then take that and say, oh, well so and so was doing this. There's no reason I can't go do this other thing. 

I love that we can help break down some of those barriers that are inside people's heads,

absolutely. Yeah. And barriers. I think we can break down barriers that we sort of have, that other people have, but as you say, also the ones that are in our own heads, 

I do have a wishlist, like I don't know how to make this happen, but I wanna create more. Women in GIS and particularly more women of color in GIS, um, for those who will be listening to this series, it was harder than I expected it to be, to find the speakers that you are going to be listening to.

And I really hope that the next time there's, an episode of the North Star. Gaze podcast that focuses on women in GIS that we're just flooded with, more and more people. I hope that you and the audience will reach out to us and go, Hey, how come you didn't invite me to be in this series? So, this is an opportunity not just for you to listen to us, but for you to talk to us as well.

Eva, I'm so grateful to you for agreeing to give time to the North Star Gaze Podcast. I really appreciate you. I appreciate your work, your energy you're in. Enthusiasm and, and for opening up your Rolodex. Oh, boy did I say Rolodex? 

You just aged us both.

I love it. Wow. I love it for 

opening up your contact list to us to help us find women to interview for this, series. Thank you again. I appreciate you. 

This has absolutely been my pleasure. I hope to add more contacts to my Rolodex. When I say that, what I mean is, as you said, I hope that we are flooded with folks saying, Hey, what about me?

I would like to be talking about what I do. It's really exciting. So thank you for giving me this opportunity to share. 

You are so welcome.