MTC Asset Newsletter Winter 2006

UNI steers students toward transportation careers

When Jess Elder, James Gerjevic, and Matthew Kajewski started their master’s programs in the Department of Geography at the University of Northern Iowa, they weren’t particularly interested in transportation. Elder was interested in GIS and planning, Gerjevic in GIS and remote sensing, and Kajewski in GIS and computer science.

With MTC support and faculty encouragement, all three students were able to develop their interests in transportation, combine them with their backgrounds in geospatial technologies, and enter careers as transportation professionals.

Jess Elder, who studied the application of travel demand models to university campuses, landed a job with the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, D.C. as a GIS analyst/cartographer on flight path and terrain analysis. (He’s since taken a job with the National Geographic Society.)

After completing his thesis on the extraction of transportation infrastructure data from hyperspectral remote sensing imagery, James Gerjevic found work as a GIS specialist at the Union Pacific Railroad. His focus is on the management of railroad infrastructure assets (see below).

Matthew Kajewski conducted research on the automated query and analysis of crash statistics in a GIS environment using MapObjects, Visual Basic, and CrimeStat (a point pattern analysis package). He now works as a GIS architect/programmer at IMAPS, LLC, a firm in the St. Louis area involved in GIS, navigation, and aviation flight planning. Kajewski’s work deals with aeronautical and nautical navigation applications and charts for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Coast Guard.

UNI grad makes good at Union Pacific

James Gerjevic was involved in a project to make the process of locating railroad maps more efficient. It included scanning and georeferencing 15,000 or so paper maps. It also involved developing some ArcIMS and stand-alone applications to deliver the maps to the people who wanted to see them.

Union Pacific was pleased with the results. So much so that its real estate department’s GIS group has grown from one person to five. The project was even featured in the spring 2005 edition of ArcNews.