2023 SAG Award Winners

Clemson Center for Geospatial Technologies

View Photo(s) of Award Presentation

Project Goal

The Clemson Center for Geospatial Technologies (CCGT) was founded in 2015 with the mission of building a community of interdisciplinary geospatial science practitioners through the support of research, teaching, and outreach activities using technologies that enable the collection, analysis, and application of geospatial data. CCGT was created as an innovative partnership between the libraries and IT, where staffed collaboration and training spaces provide a wide range of services, including specialized training and workshops, data services, access and support to infrastructure for geospatial analysis (ranging from software licensing for GIS through high performance computing and deep learning), and support for research and proposal development.
Innovation, collaboration, and support are the principles that guide CCGT’s mission. We strive to make GIS accessible to everyone at Clemson, wherever their level of comfort is, and empower them to further the edges of knowledge in their field
Learn more about us
Learn more about our application: Site 1 | Site 2

Business Problem Solved

Before the creation of the Center, there were no support services to help with GIS at Clemson. With six GIS labs and hundreds of students learning GIS, all support fell into the hands of faculty.

The Center was created to assist faculty and students integrate geospatial technologies within their scholarly activities across all disciplines at Clemson University and build connections between academic, industrial, governmental and non-governmental institutions throughout the world.

As part of Clemson Computing and Information Technology’s Research Computing and Data support group, CCGT staff collaborate with faculty and library staff to provide campus-wide services.

Technology Implemented

Clemson does not have a geography or GIS department, so part of CCGT’s mission is to stay up-to-date with the latest geospatial technologies and train and expose our GIS community to the latest advances in GIS science.
CCGT’s strategic investments include early adoption of drone equipment and applications for geospatial technologies, high throughput computing, real-time big data analytics, and deep learning, amongst others.
CCGT administers the ESRI site licenses for both academic and administrative purposes, and trains any of the ArcGIS platform products that are available as part of that license. Within a year of taking over license administration, the number of ArcGIS products taught and used for research started to grow across departments. CCGT was an early adopter of ArcGIS Online and Story Maps, and the number of users has grown almost exponentially from 100 users to well over 7,000 that CCGT currently supports.

Development Team Biography

Patricia Carbajales-Dale serves as the Director of CCGT, where she provides vision, leadership, and strategic direction of the Center’s programs and initiatives.
Gakumin Kato is the GIS Manager at CCGT. He manages the daily operations and coordination of geospatial services of CCGT.
Patrick Claflin is our GIS Developer and Systems Administrator. Patrick manages our GIS enterprise systems and develops custom applications and scripts.
Maziar Fooladi is our Drone and GIS Specialist. He plays a lead role in developing CCGT’s Drone Program and special projects.
David White is one of the original founders of CCGT. Dr. White brings highly specialized knowledge in GIS and environmental information management systems.
Ellie Masoomkhah is contracted with CCGT to work on highly specialized GIS projects.
Blake Lytle is a contractor with CCGT. He advises our staff in best practices for collecting and processing drone data, including LiDAR and hyperspectral data collection.