Ms. Emily Blackburn

A skilled analyst in both data and geographical information science, Emily has made a career of transforming and innovating with data to tell stories and to offer practical, actionable solutions to sticky problems. Emily spent 15 years doing this as the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department where she ran the Crime Analysis Division. There she was able to lead a team in both intelligence and tactical crime analysis, utilizing space, time, and place to help in the City’s crime fighting efforts. In doing so, she leaned heavily on GIS and geospatial science, both as a scientific tool and as a pathway to understanding complex data quickly so that solutions could be found in a fast-paced environment. To that end, she and her team won a 2021 Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) award from ESRI for a suite of dashboards and apps she created while working at the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. When UMSL offered a position as a geospatial analyst, Emily jumped at the chance to broaden her range, and assist the University (from which she obtained her Master’s back in 2001) in building out geospatial across campus – both in teaching and research.