Senior Research Scientist
Office: Room 323, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 760-9993
Email: salbeke@uwyo.edu
Dr. Shannon Albeke has been part of WyGISC since 2010 and is a Senior Research Scientist and Faculty member. His primary research focuses around applied GIS, programming and statistics. As such, he provides research support for faculty and graduate students within the Program in Ecology as well as many other departments and programs within UW. His teaching centers on database management and applied GIS methods using primarily open source software.
Shannon earned a B.A. in Environmental Sciences with minors in Geography and Geology in 1997 from the University of Colorado – Boulder. He then began an 8-year career as an Aquatic Habitat Biologist for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, and by necessity, learned how to be a GeoSpatial Data Scientist. In 2006, he resigned from CDOW to become a PhD student at the University of Georgia where he worked on Coastal River Otters in Prince William Sound, AK, earning his PhD in 2010.
Geospatial Analyst
Office: Room 306, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-6649
Email: mberends@uwyo.edu
Margo Berendsen is a GIS analyst, educator, and research scientist at the University of Wyoming. She teaches courses on Geospatial Foundations, Spatial Data Visualization, and works on various research projects and GIS analysis projects. She co-authored the Wyoming Student Atlas, a publication that has been distributed to all Wyoming elementary and middle schools, and developed the Atlas into a series of standards-based interactive story maps as another K-12 education resource. She is currently working on an NSF study on how learning with GIS improves spatial thinking.
Margo received her MA in Geography from the State University of New York at Buffalo and holds a GISP from the GIS Certification Institute. She is a member of the American Association of Geographers, the Wyoming Geographic Alliance, and Women in GIS. She is an avid reader and loves hiking and riding horses in the mountains with family and friends.
WyGISC Director and Senior Research Scientist
Office: Room 335, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-2736
Email: jeff.hamerlinck@uwyo.edu
Dr. Jeff Hamerlinck has served as Director of the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center since 2004. In this role he is responsible for guiding the Center’s strategic vision and overall operations. As WyGISC Director he serves on the State of Wyoming Governor’s GIS Advisory Board and is active in the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). His teaching and research interests range from land-use and environmental planning to spatial data infrastructure management and place-based planning support systems.
Jeff received his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he studied the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in rural community land-use planning. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and holds the designation of GIS Professional (GISP) by the GIS Certification Institute. A 2011 graduate of Leadership Wyoming, Jeff is an avid fly-fisher and day-hiker, and has recently re-discovered recreational tennis.
Senior Research Scientist
Office: Room 308, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-3709
Email: phodza@uwyo.edu
Paddington Hodza is a Senior Research Scientist at WyGISC. He is a native of Zimbabwe where he completed BSc Surveying and MSc Land and Geographic Information Systems at the University of Zimbabwe. Paddington worked for World Wide Fund for Nature and Environment and Remote Sensing Institute before moving to the U.S. in 2002 to pursue a PhD in Geography at West Virginia University. He joined University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in 2007 where he directed the GIScience Certificate program for which he led the development. He is a certified GIS Professional, licensed FAA Drone Pilot, recipient of Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship and Leadership Wyoming alumnus. He was elected to the UCGIS Board of Directors for a 3-year term beginning in 2019 and serves on UCGIS Education Committee and University of Wyoming Faculty Senate. His current research interests include UAS, multimodal GIS education, positivity GIS, immersive geovisualization and spatial data science.
Assistant Professor
Office: Room 329, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-2749
Email: amadson@uwyo.edu
Austin Madson is an assistant professor at WyGISC. He received his PhD from UCLA in the Department of Geography in 2020 and leads classes in Remote Sensing (RS) and UAVs within the WyGISC GIST framework. He is a physical geographer with research interests within the Earth and geoscience realms. In particular, Austin utilizes advanced RS techniques (insar, lidar, optical) along with computational modeling and field instrumentation to study hydrologic and geomorphologic changes. He has interests in geodesy, Raspberry Pi projects, cluster computing, data processing parallelization, data visualization, open-source programming, low-cost GNSS hardware, semi-autonomous rover and UAV construction, sensor fusion, UAS data acquisition, SfM, lidar and radar RS techniques, real-world applications in the use of RS and GIS, and the integration of RS and GIS technologies. Austin enjoys tinkering on projects, fieldwork, soccer, and just soaking up the outdoors.
GIST Program Director
Office: Room 308, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 287-2891
Email: mmcmilla@uwyo.edu
Beth McMillan joined the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC) as director for academic programs in 2022. She is responsible for the operation and growth of WyGISC’s interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs in Geospatial Information Science and Technology (GIST). Prior to joining the University of Wyoming, she was a faculty member at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock where she served as chairperson in the Department of Earth Sciences and as developer and coordinator of their graduate Geospatial Technology certificate program. She has taught GIS and Remote Sensing courses to graduate and undergraduate students for 18 years.
Beth received her BA in Geology from Colorado College, MS in Environmental Science and Engineering from Colorado School of Mines and PhD in Geology from the University of Wyoming. Her research interests focus on the interaction between external and internal Earth processes and how these shape landforms. Her dissertation was on the late Cenozoic landscape evolution of the Rocky Mountains which was inspired by remnant landforms in the basins and ranges of Wyoming.
Senior Research Scientist
Office: Room 331, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-2721
Email: sivan@uwyo.edu
Dr. Ramesh Sivanpillai is a remote sensing scientist with the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center at University of Wyoming where he teaches remote sensing courses and directs the WyomingView program. He received his B. Sc Physics from PSG College of A&S, M. Sc Environmental Studies from Cochin University of S&T, M. Phil Environmental Sciences from Bharathiar University (all from India), M. S Environmental Sciences & Policy from University Wisconsin – Green Bay, and PhD Forestry from Texas A&M University.
For more than 25 years he has worked on digital processing of remotely sensed data for applications forestry, rangeland, agriculture, water bodies, disaster assessment, and land cover/land use studies. He has worked with several national and international agencies, and academic institutions in India, United States of America, Mexico, Mali, Nicaragua, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Kenya, and Australia. He has served on the Board of Directors of AmericaView and is serving on the board of the ASPRS-RMR chapter. He serves as an associate editor in the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing (since 2008) and Frontiers of Earth Science (since 2014).
Associate Professor
Office: Room 332, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-2532
Email: cxu3@uwyo.edu
Dr. Chen Xu is an Associate Professor in the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC). He joined the Department of Geography as an Assistant Professor in 2014 and joined WyGISC after the restructuring of the curriculum in 2019. He received a B.S. in engineering from Sichuan University, China, in 1999, and an M.S. in computer science from Sam Houston State University in 2005. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from Texas A&M University, College Station in 2010. From 2010 to 2014 he worked at George Mason University as a research scientist.
His research interests span both geocomputation and geographic information science. Much of his work has been on improving the understanding and design of volunteered geographic information (VGI) system, mainly through the application of geocomputation and data mining technologies. In the geographic information science area, he has worked on applying cybernetic theories to geospatial investigations.
Assistant Professor
Office: Room 329, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-2744
Email: dyang1@uwyo.edu
Dr. Di Yang is an Assistant Professor at WyGISC. Di received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Florida in 2019. She is a geographer and geospatial data scientist with expertise in geospatial informatics, applied remote sensing, volunteered geographic information (VGI), and macrosystem ecology. Her research interest lies in the development of advanced remote sensing techniques through digital image processing and geovisualization applications, specifically in coupled human-environment interactions and citizen sciences. She is also committed to developing and sharing expertise in processing and analyzing large ecological and remote sensing databases by using cutting-edge tools (e.g., Google Earth Engine, Microsoft Azure, and Web-GIS) to benefit conservation, resource management, landowners, and policymakers.