Ph.D. Student
Linda's
MS project was titled "Geographies of Exclusion: The Challenge of Locating Permanent Supportive Housing for the Chronically Homeless in Knoxville, Tennessee." Linda works as Community Development Administrator in the City of Knoxville. She has maintained regular
contact with our department, and presented her research on the homeless in Knoxville in Micheline van Riemsdijk's Cultural Geography course in 2013. She can make a complex issue such as homelessness accessible to our students, and she uses her professional
background in the HUD authority to address challenges in providing assistance for the homeless.
Distinguished
Alumni Lifetime Award (over 25 years since graduation):
Eddie Pickle (B.A. 1978)
Eddie
Pickle pursued an honors major working with Geography faculty that included courses in mathematics, computer science, English, and economics along with geography. He graduated Summa Cum Laude, and was a Torchbearer and a Phi Beta Kappa initiate. He received
an NSF fellowship to fund his advanced studies in geography at UCLA (MA 1980).
Eddie
is currently a Councilor of the American Geographical Society (AGS), has been a senior corporate executive at leading data companies (Claritas and DigitalGlobe) and has founded two geospatial software startups (Ionic Enterprise and Boundless).
Eddie started working on a Ph.D. in Economics at UCLA, but left in 1981 to begin a career in the nascent field of commercial demography and applying technology to geographic problems. He became a demographic statistician and site location analyst for CACI in
Los Angeles and an expert in the emerging fields of geodemographics and market segmentation. In 1987, Eddie was recruited by Claritas to help improve the PRIZM system that formed the basis for information contained in the non-fiction best seller
The Clustering of America by Michael
J. Weiss (Harpercollins 1988). He rose to become President of the Claritas Financial Services Group.
In the late 1990s, Eddie and a former Claritas president formed IXI (now part of Equifax) to build even more sophisticated market segmentation systems. In 2002, Eddie, along with the current President of the AGS Christopher Tucker, founded Ionic Enterprises,
a company that brought Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) software into wide market use. The company grew into a multi-million dollar software enterprise and was purchased by Hexagon in 2007. In 2009, Eddie was recruited by the Open Planning Project, a New
York-based nonprofit working for better transportation alternatives. Eddie developed a profit arm of the company called Open Geo and produced the leading geospatial open source software (Geo Server). In 2013, Open Geo was reincorporated as Boundless Spatial,
Inc.
In 2014, Eddie stepped down as CEO of Boundless Spatial, Inc. and, in 2015, joined Radiant Blue, a leading developer of technology to the US Intelligence community. Eddie developed and deployed a cloud-based open source geotechnology application (GEOINT Service)
that was subsequently acquired by Digital Globe. Today Eddie is using his combined geographic data and software expertise to help Digital Globe tackle the challenges of managing and operating massive imagery and vector data storage in the cloud to solve a
multitude of human and physical geography problems.