Over the last few months, we have welcomed eight new colleagues, and we are excited to introduce you to them.
Katie Bayes joins Azavea as a UI/UX Designer. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design and earned her BFA from Pratt Institute in New York. A lifelong painter, she entered art school as an illustration major, but quickly found her voice in typography, grid systems, and front-end coding. She switched to graphic design and never looked back.
After graduation, she designed everything from choose-your-own-adventure to board books for Penguin Random House while continuing to dabble in web design and development on the side, and soon transitioned to making websites and interfaces full-time. She’s worked in marketing and product design and particularly enjoys visualizing data. She’s also a huge fan of content-driven and responsive design.
In her free time, she’s often cooking and baking bread, watching cartoons, or building elaborate lego sculptures with her daughter.
Jenny Fung joins Azavea as an Software Developer with the Geospatial Insights Team. She comes to Philadelphia from St. Louis, where she graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in Environmental Biology and International Studies. While there she worked for local environmental and social justice organizations, including an urban farming summer camp.
A big city girl from Manhattan, Jenny loves dancing, Ecuador, public transit, the 70’s, and urban foraging. While she is disappointed cheesesteaks default to whiz, she is excited to become an active citizen of Philadelphia.
Tyler Gilcrest joins Azavea as a Project Manager on the Geospatial Insights team, where he works on HunchLab, a predictive policing software, and other custom GIS software projects. Prior to joining Azavea, Tyler worked at Huron Consulting Group supporting ERP software implementations at large university systems through project management of design, testing, and change management. His work included working with client stakeholders and module subject matter experts to design business processes and technical solutions, generating test scripts to perform QA testing of applications, and creating training documents and change management plans for end-user acceptance. Tyler graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Vanderbilt University. To this end, he completed a thesis on the study of computational docking of protein and ligand models for the design of cancer therapeutics. Tyler is a Venture For America Fellow in the Class of 2015.
Klaas Hoekema joins Azavea as a Software Developer on the Geospatial Insights Team. He graduated from Calvin College with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Computer Science and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Gender Studies. He comes to Azavea from Solutions for Progress, where he developed web applications to provide low-income people with free and straightforward tax filing and connect them with the public benefits to which they’re entitled. Prior to that, he spent a couple years as a paralegal in a non-profit law center focused on disability- and education rights litigation.
Outside of the office Klaas is a parent, a bike dork of the commuting and the endurance cycling varieties, a personal finance nerd, a steam heat nerd, and an award-winning pie baker.
Lucien Knechtli joins Azavea as a Software Developer on the Geospatial Insights team. He studied Bio-engineering and Computer Engineering at Lehigh University, and finished with a B.S. in Computer Science in 2014. After graduating, Lucien worked at Lockheed Martin on mission critical shipboard software. While there, he grew an interest in making a larger civic impact than would be possible while working on military projects. Lucien joined Azavea’s Geospatial Insights team in October 2015.
In his free time, Lucien works on various software side projects, plays and mods video games, and reads science fiction while fending off an overly energetic cat.
Arianna Robbins joins Azavea as a Project Manager on the Civic Applications team. Arianna is a graduate of Emory University, where she double majored in International Studies and Economics, focusing on peace and conflict studies. At Emory, she directed the university’s largest student service organization and co-captained the women’s club ultimate frisbee team. She got her first taste of geospatial analytics while writing her honors thesis on Al Qaeda affiliates, and is excited to learn more at Azavea. Arianna is a Venture For America Fellow in the Class of 2015.
Arianna can be found chasing after a frisbee, extolling the virtues of the “Fast & Furious” franchise, or cooking for friends and family.
Hadley Stein joins Azavea as a Product Specialist for OpenTreeMap, a web and mobile-based platform for mapping urban forests and quantifying their ecological and economic value. Hadley graduated from Georgetown with a BA in Government and minors in Spanish and Peace and Justice Studies. Hadley brings a strong interest in issues related to urban development and sustainability.
Prior to Azavea, she served as a Corps Member with City Year New York, spent a summer doing strategy consulting to federal agencies and most recently worked for a venture-backed software company in the payments analytics space. Hadley is a Venture For America Fellow in the Class of 2015.
In her spare time, you can find her hiking (or skiing down) mountains near and far, eating her way through Philly’s restaurant scene, reading novels, doing yoga and exploring the city.
Adele Zhang joins Azavea as a Product Specialist for HunchLab, a predictive policing software. Originally from Hong Kong, she graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University with a BA in Economics. Prior to joining Azavea, Adele worked as an M&A Analyst at China E-Capital, an boutique investment bank. As an analyst, she primarily worked with start-ups, helping numerous companies raise funding or seek acquisitions. Adele is a Venture For America Fellow in the Class of 2015.
In her free time, Adele enjoys reading novels, arguing about TV Shows and competitive Pokemon battles.