Sean Gorman

Dr. Sean Gorman is a researcher and practitioner in the field of data science with a specialty in location based analytics.  Currently, he is the Chief Strategist for ESRI’s DC Development Center.  Previously he was the founder of GeoIQ, which was subsequently acquired by ESRI. The development of the GeoIQ platform is in part a fusion of Sean's background and interest in human geography, GIS, humanitarian relief, statistical mechanics, social media, and making the world of data (especially the geospatial variety) available to the public.  Through the development of GeoCommons, and working with other geo-community projects, the GeoIQ team has helped influence the growing field of crowdsourcing for geographic data.  

Sean has also previously worked in academia serving as a research professor at George Mason University, and worked in industry as the as VP of R&D for GeoTel and Director of Strategy for iXOL.  His academic research was focused on security, network analysis and geospatial technologies, and has been featured in Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, The Washington Post, Business 2.0 and CNN.  He has published over 25 academic articles in a variety of journals on topics ranging from crowdsourcing to complexity science, as well as authoring the book Networks, Complexity, and Security. He served as a subject matter expert for the Critical Infrastructure Task Force and Homeland Security Advisory Council, and was selected as one of the “Top 35 Entrepreneurs Under 35” by BisNow on Business. Sean received his PhD from George Mason University as the Provost's High Potential Research Candidate, Fisher Prize winner and a INFORMS Dissertation Prize recipient.