Your community deserves data-driven decisions about transit, housing, and equity. DW Rowlands Solutions can help you turn spatial data into actionable insights, from identifying activity centers to mapping disinvestment patterns to mapping assets and writing analyses of geographic data. I am actively seeking new clients interested in short-term and long-term GIS and spatial data analysis projects.
I have experience working on transportation and urban policy topics in academia, think tanks, and the United States Federal government. I am an expert in GIS and spatial data analysis using R and QGIS, and also have substantial experience using ESRI products, including ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online.
US urban geography and history and Census Bureau and other US Federal Government datasets are particular areas of experience, but I am interested in branching out to other topics as well. To discuss my work, propose new projects, or request quotes, please feel free to contact me at d.w.rowlands@gmail.com or on LinkedIn or BlueSky.
My professional experience includes:
- research at the Brookings Institution, where I studied US urban areas and developed a methodology for identifying activity centers where economic, physical, social, and civic assets cluster and published roughly a dozen reports and analyses of the economics, demographics, and transportation environments of US urban and rural areas;
- work at the US Department of Transportation, where I developed an index of disadvantaged communities for use in prioritizing discretionary grants and built an ESRI ArcGIS Online web tool to display the results to stakeholders and the public;
- a wide variety of writing and analysis of urban geography and transportation issues for Greater Greater Washington and the D.C. Policy Center, advocacy and policy organizations working in the Washington, DC area;
- mapping and data analysis for redistricting in the United States, including data-driven anti-gerrymandering advocacy in Prince George’s County, Maryland and performing all data analysis and mapping tasks for the City of College Park, Maryland’s post-2020 Census redistricting.
- graduate research in human geography at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where I developed a typology of US metro areas and neighborhood types based on a GIS analysis of publicly-available, largely government-sourced data.
My educational background includes master’s degrees in physical chemistry (from MIT) and human geography (from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County). My human geography master’s thesis was on developing a spatial-data-driven typology of US metro areas and their neighborhoods to identify neighborhoods and regions particularly amenable to public transportation. I also have an undergraduate degree in chemistry (with honors) from Caltech.