Friday Keynote Speakers

The Honorable Jim Geringer

Jim is a native of Wheatland, Wyoming with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kansas State University. He was a commissioned Officer in the US Air Force and worked as a project officer for unmanned space programs for NASA.

After serving in the Wyoming Legislature from 1983 to 1994, he was first elected as Wyoming Governor in 1994 and reelected in 1998. While governor he focused on improving education through standards, accountability and technology, modernized economic planning to extensively include technology, changed how natural resource agencies among state federal and local governments worked together, implemented strategic planning tied to performance based budgeting, and upon leaving office provided Wyoming state government with a budget surplus, one of very few states to make that claim early in 2003. He has emphasized community-based solutions particularly for heath and social services and promoted the use of consensus building to resolve difficult issues.

Current memberships include: Mapping Sciences Committee under the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council; Western Interstate Energy Board; Association of Governing Boards for higher education; Operation Public Education; the Board of Governors of the Park City Center for Public Policy; Board member of NatureServe and, co-chair of the Policy Consensus Initiative.

He joined Environmental Systems Research Institute in the summer of 2003 as Director of Policy and Public Sector Strategies, focused on how senior elected and corporate officials can enable productivity through technology more effectively in business and government.

Steven L. Robinson

Steve has been with the Los Angeles Fire Department for 22 years and has held several different positions within the Department including Firefighter, Engineer and Helicopter Pilot. It is only within the last half of my career where things get very interesting and he began to use GIS.

In March of 1998 while piloting an Air Ambulance Helicopter to Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles the Helicopter had a catastrophic tail rotor failure and Steve was required to perform a forced landing. As a result of this emergency and ultimately the crash that occurred 4 of the 6 persons onboard our helicopter were killed. Steve was critically injured. After a lengthy recovery and 9 surgeries he returned to flight status only to loose it all from a seizure due to head injuries from the crash. Since he was no longer able to perform the duties of a pilot, he needed to quickly adapt to something new.

This is where he began his journey with GIS. Not wanting to just retire he decided to continue to provide something of value to Air Operations and to the Fire Department. Using the aircraft as a GIS platform he began to fuse several different data streams to provide the “Common Operational Picture” to incident commanders and city leaders. With the help of private industry he learned how to harness GIS as a powerful tool for use in emergency incidents and also reoccurring venues. Some examples of his more recent work include the Malibu, Topanga and Simi brushfires. Steve also works with the various incident management teams (IMT) for the Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, and the Academy of Achievement.

“It is my hope that I can share areas of success for the use of GIS with first responders and also learn from others how to continue to expand and improve GIS use for the future.” – Steve Robinson.

Donald F. Cooke

Donald Cooke was a member of the Census Bureau team that developed the Dual Independent Map Encoding (DIME) system in 1967.  In 1968 he co-founded Urban Data Processing, Inc, now Harte-Hanks Data Technologies.  HHDT is a leader in supplying MCIF services and software to the bank industry.

In 1980, Mr. Cooke founded Geographic Data Technology, Inc, a premium provider of street and boundary databases for Business Geographics and LBS applications.  GDT was the major TIGER digitizing contractor in the mid-1980s, and is a CRADA partner and data supplier to the Census Bureau.  He currently serves Tele Atlas as their chief scientist.

Mr. Cooke served on the Board of Directors of URISA in the 1970s and was a member of the National Academy of Science's Mapping Science Committee from 1989 to 1993.  He is a graduate of Yale, and studied Civil Engineering Systems at MIT.

Linette T Scott, MD, MPH

Dr. Scott is a Board Certified Physician in Public Health and General Preventive Medicine. She has a Doctor of Medicine from Eastern Virginia Medical School, a Masters in Public Health from University of California, Davis, and a Bachelors of Arts in Physics from University of California, Santa Cruz. Following medical school, Dr. Scott completed a Pediatric Internship at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center and then served as a General Medical Officer with the United States Navy for four years, first as squadron physician with the Regional Support Group and later as the military physician for an Active Duty clinic. After completing the Preventive Medicine Residency Program with the California Department of Health Services, Dr. Scott joined the Department as a Public Health Medical Officer, developing expertise in data and information systems, geographic information systems (GIS), data policies and public health informatics. Now, as the Deputy Director for the Health Information and Strategic Planning Division, Dr. Scott plays a key role in managing the Center for Health Statistics and the Office of County Health Services as well as providing coordination and leadership for departmental strategic planning and the development of shared informatics resources, such as GIS.

Dr. Scott has been a leader in the use of GIS in the California Department of Health Services and now the California Department of Public Health. Using a federated approach to GIS tools, the focus has been on building collaborative relationships both with internal programs and with partners outside the Department to advance the use of GIS as a tool that supports the public health mission: to create environments in which people can be healthy.