GIS that makes the overlooked undeniable.
Real maps, real data, real people who needed someone to notice. New ones posted here roughly every week.
Maps and tools built for people who are usually assumed to have a car, current technology, or money to spare — food access, mental health, transit, and healthcare.
I tracked every Pace bus for a month and checked it against Pace's own schedule. Between 1 in 94 and 1 in 53 trips never appeared, most of them in the south suburbs. At my own stop, a quarter to a third of rush-hour buses never left.
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Joining 14,510 volunteer mapping projects against every UN humanitarian appeal since 2014 shows that volunteer mapping tracks the size of an emergency only up to a point. Among the 36 largest crises, the relationship disappears.
14,510 mapping projects, 160 countries, 532 UN appeals worth $400 billion
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Thirty years after the 1995 Chicago heat wave, satellite thermal imagery and 1995 business records show the neighborhoods that suffered most were not the hottest by day, but the ones that stayed hot at night and had lost their gathering places.
121 satellite scenes, 110,605 rows of 1995 business records, 77 community areas
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Replicating a 2025 PLOS One geographically weighted regression study on real, more recent Chicago crime data, to show where the real predictors of crime strengthen, weaken, or reverse across the city.
389,334 real incidents, 777 census tracts, 2023–2025
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Replicating a April 2026 PLOS ONE street-network study on Chicago for the first time, to find which neighborhoods have real services nearby AND a connected street grid, and which have only one or neither.
77 community areas, real OpenStreetMap network analysis
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A single executive order renamed a Great Lake for U.S. Google Maps users. A real toggle map showing what changed, and why OpenStreetMap doesn't work that way.
Renamed by executive order, August 28, 2026
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The real HOT/NAXA volunteer mapping response to the August 2026 Nepal flood, alongside cloud-masked before/after satellite imagery and the real, still-rising toll.
241 volunteer mappers, 848 tasks, live HOT data
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Real, state-by-state case counts for all 139 CDC-notifiable diseases, tracked against the actual dated timeline of federal vaccine policy changes since RFK Jr. took over HHS.
139 diseases, all 50 states + D.C., 2022–2026
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County-level suicide rates, mental distress, and uninsured rates swiped directly against where mental health facilities actually are, all 102 counties, built for a NAMI DuPage audience.
25 of 102 counties have zero listed facilities
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Testing a real 2026 Demography paper's finding at the town level: racial dissimilarity between adjacent Chicagoland municipalities predicts less shared activity space, independent of income.
Racial dissimilarity: p = 0.001. Income gap: p = 0.846.
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Every cafe, library, community center, and social facility across 319 Chicagoland municipalities, mapped per capita with a ZIP code search and all 2,645 individual locations plotted.
319 municipalities, 2,645 real locations
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285 geocoded food pantries across a 90-mile Chicago radius, cross-referenced against real CTA, Metra, and Pace transit lines to show what's actually reachable without a car.
180 of 285 pantries within 0.5 mi of transit
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Live, auto-updating dashboard tracking Canadian wildfire smoke and its impact on Chicago-area air quality — rebuilds itself daily via GitHub Actions, no manual updates.
Rebuilds automatically every day
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31 in-person community interviews turned into a StoryMap mapping mental health resources across DuPage County. Still live today.
31 responses · 2 weeks
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Streams live Overture Maps GeoParquet data from AWS S3 alongside Census tract boundary data via pygris to analyze healthcare access across Illinois.
Sparked technical discussion with GIS and software engineers on LinkedIn
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My 2023 capstone layering Census data against SNAP retailers and Pace bus routes. Now being rebuilt open-source at a 90-mile Chicago radius — still in progress.
166 / 523 locations (31%) bus-accessible
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Rates CTA stations across walkable zones by heat vulnerability, layering climate and demographic data to flag where extreme heat hits transit riders hardest.
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Analyzes canopy cover and trail elevation across DuPage County Forest Preserves to find the shadiest walking routes — built to solve my own need for a cool trail.
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Live precipitation and humidity across Illinois weather stations — built after I noticed an unusually long stormy stretch and wanted to see it mapped out.
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Maps every U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility and its reported population as of March 2026, built on an ArcGIS Dashboard — making a large, dispersed federal system visible in one place.
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