Eileen Allen is a familiar and respected face across the New York State GIS landscape. First a foremost an instructor at SUNY Plattsburgh, she has instructed and mentored hundreds of students who are now part of the statewide geospatial fabric. And in her spare time she has participated and contributed to numerous statewide GIS advisory committees over the past 20 years. Always upbeat and a pleasure to work with, she is most certainly a first ballot lock for the GIS wing at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
eSpatiallyNewYork: How long have you been at SUNY Plattsburgh?
Allen: I was an undergraduate student at Plattsburgh State from 1973-1977. In August 1984, I was hired to help finish a remote sensing research grant mapping historical beaver locations in the Adirondacks. I’ve been here ever since.
eSpatiallyNewYork: Where are you originally from and tell us about your journey that led to Plattsburgh.
Allen: Both my husband and I grew up in Plattsburgh. Fortunately there were state and federal programs to help me get a college education. After college at SUNY Plattsburgh, I went to McGill and worked on a Master’s in physical geography. Everything seemed to go wrong with my advisor and the research. It was hard but necessary to leave there. Fortunately, I could use my McGill credits and finish a Master’s program in Natural Resources at SUNY Plattsburgh while I worked on research projects. I thought about getting my PhD but I just didn’t end up going in that direction. Besides, I liked the research projects I was working on too much!
eSpatiallyNewYork: You’ve been associated with the GIS program at Plattsburgh since its origin. How did it get started? Who was involved?
Allen: My involvement with teaching GIS developed out of research projects and the need to train student workers. Dr. Richard Lamb was instrumental in developing the GIS courses and a minor in addition to his planning courses and practice. He started the GIS course in the late-1990s and by the early-2000s we would take turns teaching the Introduction to GIS class. I took over all the GIS classes when he retired and the Remote Sensing courses when Dr. Donald Bogucki retired.
But there is more, because so many chance occurrences determine our path. Also, it has been noted that many more women are in GIS than in other natural sciences. When taking college classes, I was often one of a very few or the only female. Many people think that because GIS is so collaborative, women often gravitate towards it. This is certainly true for me.
As an undergraduate, I was interested in many things but was unsure what I would major in and tried out several paths. I needed a Social Science course and Physical Geography was on the list, so I took it. Drs. Donald Bogucki (Geography) and Gerhard Gruendling (Biology) were working on a pilot project mapping wetlands and demonstrated this in their classes. The grant was to investigate the use of remote sensing to estimate the impact of regulating the Richelieu River (the outflow of Lake Champlain, NY-VT) because of flooding concerns in Quebec. Dr. Bogucki showed some color infrared imagery of wetlands in Physical Geography class and I was totally flabbergasted! I absolutely had to be involved with the project! It took several days for me to get the courage up to ask if I could be part of the research. It so happened that they needed someone to use a transit to establish ground control. I had been working with my father, a land surveyor, for many years and was enlisted by Dr. Bogucki to help set out targets and map them.
In the early 1970’s, it was very unusual for an ecologist and a geomorphologist to work together. That was part of the attraction, though, where many of my interests could be combined. By chance, at about the same time, the Environmental Science Program was started at SUNY Plattsburgh and I had found my academic home. I continued to be part of the project mapping Lake Champlain wetlands using custom flown 70-mm imagery until my graduation.
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