URISA Announces 2024 Young Professional Scholarship Winners

URISA is pleased to announce that Katie Walker and Olamiposi Fagunloye are the recipients of 2024 Dr. Marilyn O’Hara Ruiz Young Professional Scholarships*. The scholarship fully supports young professional participation in URISA’s GIS-Pro annual conference, fostering their professional connections and educational development.

Selection Criteria

• Demonstrated work and/or research within the GIS (or related) industry
  
• Quality of responses to essay questions
  
• Impact of work, contributions to the GIS field
• Letter of recommendation

URISA established the scholarship program which selects up to two young professionals (35 years old or younger) to attend GIS-Pro in-person. The scholarship application is rigorous, and the evaluation committee appreciates the effort and detail with which all candidates presented their qualifications.

Meet this year’s winners:

Katie Walker was most recently a GIS Teaching Assistant at Clark University in Worcester, MA and an Environmental Data Analyst Intern for the U.S. Forest Service. She was a Geospatial Analyst at Maxar Technologies; an Image Annotator at Athenium Analytics; and an Urban Agriculture Trainer for the U.S. Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa.

She earned her Bachelor of Science in Geography, Cum Laude (May 2018) and a Geospatial Information Analysis Certificate from the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida and will earn a Master of Science in Environmental Science and Policy from Clark University next May. Katie’s Master's thesis will focus on the impact of wildfires on air quality in New England.

Waverly Thompson was her supervisor at Maxar, where Katie was a Geospatial-Imagery Analyst and Project Point of Contact (POC) from June 2022 through June 2023. Waverly notes that when Katie was “presented with the opportunity to step up as a Project POC, Katie both accepted and excelled. Not only did she prove her ability to prioritize and manage her time successfully, but she moved up the ranks and began carrying out standard QC, reviewing the work of other analysts and communicating her recommended edits before deliveries. Overall, Katie showed great professionalism as well as genuine interest while working on the team. Although I only got to work with Katie for about a year, she was one of my most reliable team members due to her independence and ability to take initiative. With Katie’s dedicated work ethic and positive attitude towards learning, I have no doubt she will succeed in all future endeavors.”


Olamiposi Fagunloye is a Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He also worked as an ESG/Sustainability Intern at the Wylde Center in Decatur, Georgia; Remote Work Geospatial Data Analyst and Insights Intern for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT); GIS and Remote Sensing Manager at Nigeria Flying Labs; and a Climate Data Analyst at the Centre for Space Research and Applications, Akure, Ondo State, Nigeria.

He earned a B.Tech, Remote Sensing & Geoscience Information Systems from the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria in 2021. His Undergraduate Thesis was focused on: “Mapping of Flood Risk Zones using a Multi-Criteria Approach and Radar.” Olamiposi expects to earn his M.Sc., Geosciences – Geography Concentration from Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA in December.

Jeremy E. Diem was Olamiposi’s M.S. thesis adviser as well as being his instructor in Global Climate Change in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University. He noted that Olamiposi “has focused his efforts on using Geographic Information Science (GIS) to better understand environmental phenomena. He has taken every GIS course in the department and has excelled in all of them. His thesis, which examines intra-annual variations in urban effects on precipitation, has a heavy GIS component and has the potential to show exactly where precipitation enhancement occurs in the Atlanta, Georgia region.”

Akpofure Fakpor taught Olamiposi at the Federal University of Technology in Akure and was also his academic advisor and supervisor. “I have had the privilege of witnessing his exceptional dedication, skills, and passion for leveraging geospatial technologies to drive positive change.”

Taylor Shelton, PhD, Assistant Professor Department of Geosciences Georgia State University shared that “Though his performance throughout the semester was consistently solid, he capped things off by producing an excellent final project in the form of a multivariate map comparing state-level cancer mortality to multiple demographic variables.”

Katie and Olamiposi will both attend GIS-Pro 2024 in Portland, Maine in October.
URISA is pleased to support these young professionals, along with so many others who are the future leaders of the organization.

A core strategic goal for URISA is to support GIS professionals at all stages of their careers. URISA has established a number of programs to support young professionals and has active participation through programs such as GISCorps with abundant, diverse and rewarding volunteer opportunities, the URISA GIS Leadership Academy, and the Vanguard Cabinet which collaborates with URISA leaders and committees to create programs and opportunities geared toward other young professionals. Learn more about the scholarship, and consider donating to support future winners.

* This scholarship fund was established in 2018 and honors Dr. Marilyn Ruiz. During Dr. Ruiz's career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she provided her undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students with excellent research experiences in her laboratory which helped them to have successful careers in academia, government, and industry. Marilyn was passionate about her role as a mentor of graduate education.