Savannah Cooley

Intern (Summer 2015)

Savannah Cooley is a senior undergraduate student at Clark University in Massachusetts majoring in Economics and minoring in Math and Geography with a concentration in Computational Science. She is an M.S. candidate for Clark’s accelerated Master’s program in Geographic Information Science (GIS). The cross-disciplinary education Savannah pursues reflects her passion for recognizing the interconnected nature, particularly the spatial relationships, of natural and human systems and enables her to use tools from many disciplines to investigate these systems. Savannah’s applications of GIS range from working with a non-profit in the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest to build the region’s first web-based GIS application to working  with the Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Commission, professors, and students to identify priority road segments to improve in order to increase Worcester County’s food system connectivity by using road condition data and modeling the routes farmers would take to go to farmer’s markets in the region given the road network.  This summer, Savannah has the opportunity to work at the Center for Spatial Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) on a project that partners with the UCSB Library to coordinate an integration of spatial data into the university’s online GIS application. More broadly, the project also seeks to resolve the challenges that libraries and researchers face in trying to discover spatial data via metadata on diverse platforms and in a variety of environments.