“For some of you, the idea of a time before the internet is very foreign,” Steven Steinberg (MS ’94) laughed, addressing a group of University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) students and alumni over a video call. The irony was not lost on the call attendees, many of whom use geospatial technology and online databases every day in their academic or professional careers. Steinberg does as well, but his career in geographic information systems (GIS) started over 30 years ago at U-M, when online mapping technology was barely a thought in anyone’s head. In 1994, Steinberg graduated with his master’s degree from SEAS, where he focused on natural resource policy and management as well as remote sensing. 

Growing up, Steinberg had a strong connection to the outdoors and spent large parts of his childhood going on backpacking and camping trips with his family. He also was interested in computers, beginning with an early model with “a monochrome screen, a couple of floppy disk drives, no modems, no internet, no anything.”

Steinberg started his undergraduate degree in the pre-med track, but his interests kept coming back to those key components of how he grew up, and he switched to a degree program studying natural resources at Kent State University. At the time, Kent State had a partner program with U-M that allowed him to transfer to the school during his senior year and move straight into the master’s program. At Kent State, Steinberg became particularly interested in traditional print aerial photography and comparing current images with historical maps. He grew that interest and became involved in the geospatial world at SEAS with courses on early geospatial analysis and remote sensing. Many of these courses were taught by Professor Emeritus Chuck Olsen, who was Steinberg’s advisor during his years at SEAS. 

After Steinberg graduated from SEAS, he started a PhD program in the Forestry Department at the University of Minnesota. He became involved in a NASA-funded project titled “ForNet,” which aimed to put geospatial technology and data on the internet and make it available for public utilization and access. The research team developed what would become known as the Minnesota Map Server, “which was arguably one of the very first times that people were mapping on the internet…it was still dial-up modems, but it worked.” Steinberg and the other members of that research team all built careers in remote sensing and GIS analysis because of the expertise they developed while working on the project.

Steinberg’s next step was a professorship at California State Polytechnic University Humboldt, where he led the geospatial research and coursework from 1998 to 2011. While there, Steinberg was involved in a project titled the Agriculture Workers’ Health Initiative. The project sticks out to him as one of the most impactful and valuable projects of his career because “for me, the most rewarding projects combine social science community-based research with quantitative analytical geospatial pieces.” The Agricultural Workers’ Health Initiative “included social science research, fieldwork, and interviews with farmworker communities doing participatory mapping, and led to actual policy change that had a meaningful impact on the otherwise disempowered communities,” Steinberg explained. He achieved tenure at Humboldt in 2010 and soon after chose to take a step back from academia. He then served as a principal scientist in a statewide water quality monitoring program at an environmental research agency in southern California.

Currently, Steinberg serves as the Geospatial Information Officer for Los Angeles County. In this role, he works across departments to develop and advocate for GIS in countywide problem-solving initiatives and projects. He aims to provide different branches of the county government with the tools they need to utilize geospatial data in their decision-making processes and to “help them see how geospatial data can aid in solving problems.” Steinberg focuses on how information from GIS databases can help in addressing questions relating to a diverse range of service provisions across the county. He also encourages sectors of the county government to include GIS data in decisions relating to equity and the collection and use of public input in government decisions.

In addition to Steinberg’s work with Los Angeles County, he serves as an adjunct professor at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches in the Geospatial Sciences Program. 

To conclude his discussion, Steinberg reflected on the people and experiences that have helped shape his career. “Get out there and meet people,” he advised. “At the end of the day, connections with Michigan alumni played crucial roles in who hired me when I first started my career. Having those people who know who you are, have seen what you can do, and can vouch for you is what sets you apart.”