Staff Spotlight: Cullen Smith

As part of FracTracker’s staff spotlight series, learn more about one of the newest member of the FracTracker team, Cullen Smith, and what he’ll be working on with us.

Time with FracTracker: Three weeks

Office Location: Remote

Title: Data Integration Specialist

Spotlight Interview

How did you first get involved working on oil and gas issues?

Growing up in northeastern PA fracking was in the local news though it wasn’t until I started preparing geospatial data for Phase I environmental assessment reports that I started to grasp the industry’s footprint.

What will you actually do in your role?

Cullen Smith, Data Integration Specialist. Read bio

The goal is to lay the groundwork enabling FracTracker’s data to flow freely amongst all of our projects as well as be accessible to the public in a user friendly way. To accomplish that feat I’ll be developing tools to interact with a relational database that houses our data.

Previous Position and Organization

After interning with the National Park Service, I started my career in GIS at a small company just outside of Boston where we focused on environmental site assessments. Following that company’s acquisition, I’ve spent the past decade helping understaffed organizations clean up their data and automate workflows while supplying geospatial support to a handful of larger telecom oriented companies. I’m really excited about having the opportunity to focus on a singular organization’s goals again.

What is one of the most impactful projects you are excited to be involved in with FracTracker?

It’s not so much an individual project, but the opportunity to set up a centralized data source that will support all of our projects is what drew me to this role. Data’s most useful when it’s clean and accessible so having a hand in designing that platform is extremely enticing.