Center for Geographic Information Services - Staff

Director: Brady Stroh, MRP, GISP

Brady Stroh is presently the Director of the Center for Geographic Information Services in the Institute of State and Regional Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg. In this role he is responsible for the development and execution of various survey research and GIS projects that involve survey design, field data collection, database development and statistical analysis. Mr. Stroh has been involved with socio-economic and environmental planning research, GIS and data analysis for over twenty years. He helped to establish the Pennsylvania State Data Center in 1981 where he was the Center’s first Assistant Director.

After leaving the State Data Center, Mr. Stroh went to work for Market Metrics, a market research data firm, where he was the Director of Technical Services. He directed the development of a national database of supermarkets and supporting demographic data. He also directed the development and programming of a specialized GIS software product that allowed various channels in the food industry to delineate and analyze supermarket trading areas.

After leaving Market Metrics, Mr. Stroh worked as an independent consultant for twelve years, offering clients decision support/GIS, demographic and socio-economic database design, implementation and analysis services. He has worked on numerous economic development and commercial real estate analysis assignments as well as a variety of other analysis, database, and decision support/GIS projects. Mr. Stroh returned to Penn State in May 2001.

GIS Technologist: Jennifer Wootsick

Jennifer Wootsick has been a GIS Analyst for the Center for Geospatial Information Services since 2007. Responsibilities include GIS training in the Center's GIS Lab, Operations Manager for the annual Pennsylvania GIS Conference and the Ft. Indiantown Gap Sustainable Range Conference. She also serves as the research database manager for the Pennsylvania DPW funded long-term care study.

Jennifer earned her bachelor's degree in Geography from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania in 2006. Prior to joining the Center for Geospatial Information Services, she spent a summer completing her senior project at Bucks County Planning Commission in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

GIS Technologist: Larry Meyers, GISP

Larry has been with ISRA since 2002 and has primary responsibilities with the Pennsylvania State Data Center. Larry's experience includes: 12 years GIS experience specializing in ArcGIS and ArcInfo, with successful programming in VBA for Excel, SAS, AML, UNIX script, AWK and Visual Basic. Along with coordinating multiple projects and tasks, utilized Project Management skills by supervising a staff member to create maps for the County Data Book series. Diversified technical skills, with proven success in developing, implementing and improving production methods on multiple platforms. Prepared, converted and analyzed various geographic vendors’ and Census data. Detailed oriented, dependable, and confident cartographic skills.

Larry was previously employed by MapQuest where he: expanded the production capabilities of the Data Engineering Group, by incorporating ArcInfo and ArcView to build a more accurate product for MapQuest’s Web Site; processed data provided by geographic vendors, on time and with a high regard to quality for MapQuest’s Web Site; and reduced the processing time to convert vendor data for MapQuest’s Web Site by writing automated programs in UNIX, which allowed for more QA/QC time.

Technology Director: Erik Li

Experience with Microsoft products: NT Server 4.0, NT Workstation 4.0, Small Business Server 4.5/4.0, IIS 4.0/3.0, Exchange Server 5.5/5.0, Proxy Server 2.0/1.0, Terminal Server 4.0, Win95/98, Outlook 97/98/2000, Windows 2000 Server/Pro, Office 95/97/2000.
Strong experience in installing, configuring and troubleshooting Wintel-based PC and Server systems.

Network design, implementation, troubleshooting and administration experience with small to medium size networks in multi-server, multi-site environment. Experienced with various types of hubs, switches, routers, printer servers, DSL, ISDN and cable modems.

Works with network security, firewall, fault-tolerance (Raid 0, 1, 5), data backup and recovery (Seagate Backup Exec 7.0/7.2, ARCserveIT 6). Programming languages and web applications: C, Visual Basic, VB Scripts, HTML, FrontPage, Photoshop. Basic knowledge of Netware 4/5, Solaris 7, Redhat Linux 6.

Integrated Technology Center and Pennsylvania State Data Center staff of research technologists, programmer analysts, network administators, and web designers.