A native of India and a graduate student in the Information School at the University of Washington, Seattle, Karthika Sundaresan – nickname Karthika – joined the CSDE Information team on Friday, May 13. Karthika did her undergraduation in engineering specializing in Information Technology and has four+ years of industry work experience at Dell in product development. Karthika is passionate about using information technology to help people use and manage information in better ways. Karthika is eager to gain more practical experience in managing social media channels and ready to help students and affiliates of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.

Matt joined CSDE’s Methods and Data Core in 2008 to lead the development of a research infrastructure for spatial analysis. He came to CSDE with over seven years of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) research experience. At CSDE he has developed relationships with and supported the spatial analysis research needs of our center’s faculty affiliates to use GIS to collect/create, store, manage, display and analyze spatial demographic data. Broad areas of GIS services provided for affiliates’ research includes mobile data collection (phone devices with GPS), mapping/cartography, geocoding/address-matching, GIS database creation, archiving, and management, spatial data acquisition, spatial statistics and customized programming. In 2010, he received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Kansas. In 2013 he assumed the role of Assistant Director of CSDE to better integrate our faculty’s research needs and our center’s administrative and service capacities. In 2016 he became an Affiliate Assistant Professor in Geography.