{"id":328771,"date":"2020-04-07T19:59:54","date_gmt":"2020-04-08T02:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&p=328771"},"modified":"2021-06-23T18:51:05","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T01:51:05","slug":"professor-uses-gis-to-provide-simple-answers-to-complex-questions","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/professor-uses-gis-to-provide-simple-answers-to-complex-questions","title":{"rendered":"Professor Uses GIS to Provide Simple Answers to Complex Questions"},"author":5752,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1041,171,10372],"tags":[192382,241,961,295992,165642],"arcnews_issues":[430091],"class_list":["post-328771","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collaboration","category-education","category-gis-hero","tag-college","tag-gis","tag-spatial-analysis","tag-teaching","tag-university","arcnews_issues-spring-2020","arcnews_sections-gis-people"],"acf":{"short_description":"GIS Hero Arthur Lembo\u2019s career has evolved from implementing large-scale GIS projects to preparing future generations to use the technology.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Arthur Lembo\u2019s wide-reaching and varied career mirrors, in many ways, how GIS has developed as a field.\r\n\r\nHe started out engrossed in the technical aspects of the discipline and wanted to show the world what the technology itself could do. Over the years, he\u2019s realized that the essence of GIS doesn\u2019t only lie in its technological intricacies but, rather, also in its ability to provide simple answers to complex questions. Lembo\u2019s career has taken him from implementing large-scale, back end GIS projects to getting the technology to answer simple, public-facing questions to, now, preparing future generations to use the technology in innovative ways.\r\n\r\n\u201cTo me, GIS has finally arrived,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about seeing what other people don\u2019t see and answering life\u2019s challenging questions.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhen he was young, Lembo, who\u2019s now professor of geography and geoscience at Salisbury University in Maryland, didn\u2019t see geography\u2014or GIS, for that matter\u2014as something that could help him answer his own life\u2019s questions.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was an apathetic kid in high school,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t have an interest in much of anything.\u201d\r\n\r\nDuring his freshman year at the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Oneonta, he needed an elective to begin fulfilling the requirements of his business major. A friend told him to take geography because it would be easy. Lembo was pretty sure he\u2019d just have to memorize state capitals."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":328781,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cAfter the first lecture, I was hooked,\u201d Lembo recalled. \u201cIt was the engaging stories the professor told and how the problems geographers were solving were the problems people were facing on the planet. We looked at weather-related phenomena, economics, and demographics. I just saw that this was a great way to focus on where things were happening and, potentially, understand why those things were occurring.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat same year, Lembo took a course in urban geography, where he got his first taste of GIS.\r\n\r\n\u201cI couldn\u2019t believe that we were able to use data to visualize what was going on around us,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd remember, this was back in 1983. It was very caveman-like. I was using AUTOMAP 2, a precursor to ARC\/INFO, on mainframe computers with line printers, and we used something called a SYMAP ruler to actually put coordinates on a map.\u201d\r\n\r\nBecause he had to work deeply with the technology, stringing together his own commands and digging into the source code, Lembo became captivated by the information technology aspect of GIS. About six months after graduating from Oneonta, riding a wave of inspiration sparked by one of his professors, Paul Baumann, he entered the master\u2019s of geography program at SUNY Buffalo. Advised there by the late professor Hugh Calkins, Lembo plunged into learning about what it meant to implement GIS within a computing environment.\r\n\r\n\u201cHugh\u2019s mentoring really moved my career more into systems integration than actually doing a lot more geography,\u201d Lembo said.\r\n\r\nHis first job after getting his master\u2019s degree was developing GIS at AT&T, and he later moved to Esri partner Bowne Management Systems, now known as the LiRo Group. For 10 years, he continued to set up enterprise GIS implementations for high-profile organizations\u2014from Nassau County, Long Island, which is home to more than 1.3 million people, to the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), one of the New York City area\u2019s most important commuter rail systems. The work Lembo did for the LIRR helped earn him a Partner of the Year Award from Esri in 1999.\r\n\r\nOne of the most interesting projects Lembo worked on during his time in the private sector was helping to create the Name Your Own Price hotel service for the travel website Priceline. He said the Priceline staff continually challenged him by asking, \u201cCould my grandma in Topeka, Kansas, use this without asking any questions?\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWe had to think about building tools that anyone could use without having to read a help manual,\u201d said Lembo. And that was back in 1998. \u201cAll my other clients were beginning to use the internet, and I figured the natural thing to do was to create a GIS on the internet. What the Priceline guys got me to think about was, we don\u2019t want a site to do 30 different things; we want a site to do one thing really well.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat changed Lembo\u2019s thinking and made him see how powerful spatially enabled apps could be on the internet.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe were doing all this spatial analysis<\/a> on the back end that users had no idea about,\u201d he said. \u201cAs geographers, we\u2019re always going to want to understand what\u2019s happening behind the scenes. But the general public wants straightforward answers to very important questions, and we\u2019re the ones who can give them those answers. They\u2019re not interested in coordinate systems. That\u2019s the stuff we do. We\u2019re taking that and providing results for users to absorb.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat\u2019s what made the field of GIS fun to Lembo. But his thinking had also changed in another way: he\u2019d decided that he wanted to reinvest in the community that gave him so much and teach at the university level.\r\n\r\n\u201cFor me, my life was changed in college, and I wanted to give back to that environment,\u201d he said. \u201cI left a successful private sector career to go back and get my PhD so I could help students.\u201d\r\n\r\nWith buy-in from his wife and children, Lembo got his PhD in environmental resource engineering at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and started his academic career as a lecturer at Cornell University. While there, he won the SUNY Chancellor\u2019s Award for Excellence in Teaching\u2014the highest teaching award in the state\u2014as well as the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture organization\u2019s Teaching Award of Merit and the Cornell faculty\u2019s Innovation in Teaching Award.\r\n\r\n\u201cThat was validating,\u201d he said, referring to his decision to switch careers. \u201cI applied the lessons I learned in the private sector to the classroom, which I think is important.\u201d\r\n\r\nAfter seven years at Cornell, he decided to pursue a tenure-track position and wound up at Salisbury. So two of his children grew up in upstate New York, while his youngest grew up in Maryland\u2014and the whole family benefited from being deeply involved in student life.\r\n\r\n\u201cThose college students who spent so much time in our home became role models for my kids,\u201d said Lembo. \u201cAnd for some students\u2014especially international students\u2014we became their home away from home.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs a professor, Lembo\u2019s focus has always been on giving students the tools they need to learn GIS and spatial analysis and then helping them apply those skills to their own careers. In his quantitative analysis course, Lembo relies heavily on a textbook he cowrote\u2014An Introduction to Statistical Problem Solving in Geography<\/em>\u2014to acquaint students with geographic research. In his GIS course, he has undergraduate students conduct original academic research.\r\n\r\n\u201cMany of them take their research right into graduate school,\u201d said Lembo. \u201cA number of them have even been hired on the spot when companies saw the research projects they did for the class.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn 2018, Lembo received the Maryland Board of Regents\u2019 Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. This was the second time he\u2019d been given a state\u2019s highest teaching honor.\r\n\r\n\u201cI think it\u2019s really cool that there are all these disciplines out there that are known as the standard university disciplines, like English and biology, with great professors in them, yet now we\u2019re seeing that the person identified as having a major contribution to academia is a geographer doing GIS,\u201d said Lembo. \u201cIt\u2019s really worthwhile and rewarding, and I\u2019m so thankful that I do what I\u2019m doing now.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs he and his wife transition to life as empty nesters, Lembo is spending more time on hobbies that include golfing, surfing, fishing, and sailing. He\u2019s also contemplating where to take his career from here.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m teaching a lot of workshops on the technological aspects of GIS, and I have professionals come up to me afterward to ask a lot of questions,\u201d he said. \u201cAfter college, we don\u2019t really have mentors anymore, so part of my transition is shifting my focus to being in those mentor relationships with other professionals.\u201d\r\n\r\nDrawing inspiration from his family, faith, and friends, it seems that Lembo will continue using GIS to answer people\u2019s very important questions."},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Center","content":"Read other articles in the GIS Heroes<\/a> series.","snippet":""}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"\nProfessor Uses GIS to Provide Simple Answers to Complex Questions | ArcNews<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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