Geographers without Borders

Mentor Brandi Rank and Mentee Tarah Rhine discuss their experience with the Women in GIS Mentorship Program. Applications open now until July 18th at Womeningis.org!

Brandi Rank, PMP, is a geospatial technology leader with more than 20 years of experience delivering GIS solutions that align with business objectives and create measurable organizational value. As a Principal Product Engineer at Esri, she helps organizations leverage location intelligence to improve decision-making, efficiency, and strategic outcomes.Her leadership experience includes serving as GIS Manager for the City of Thornton and Business Solutions Manager for Adams County, where she drove process improvements that significantly reduced timelines and enhanced transparency. A certified PMP and Six Sigma Yellow Belt, Brandi is passionateabout helping organizations position GIS as a strategic asset that drives innovation, reduces risk, and enables lasting change.
Tarah Rhine is a GIS professional with 15 years of experience and currently is in the role of GIS Coordinator at Mendocino County. She leads the development of the County’s enterprise GIS architecture, facilitates modernization of GIS foundations, and shapes the long‑term strategy for geographic information systems across departments. With an academic foundation in environmental studies, Tarah approaches her work through a multidisciplinary lens. She uses spatial technologies to improve workflows, support organizationalchange, and strengthen collaboration. Her career experience spans transportation development, cannabis licensing, and land management—where she has consistently helped emerging governance environments build structure andcome together through the effective use of GIS.

Shannon earned her BS in Geology from Michigan Technological University and her PhD from the University at Buffalo, with a focus in physical volcanology. She’s a professor and department chair in the Department of Geosciences at Idaho State University, where she likes to claim that her research is like professional grade “the floor is lava” thanks to her work on volcanic analogs. She brags that career highlights include riding a horse, up a volcano, through the rainforest, with a machete, and serving as a faux astronaut for a simulated mission to Mars run by NASA. One of her favoriteclasses to teach is Programming for GIS, where she helps students with no coding background learn how to step up their game in geospatial analyses.

Pratikshya is originally from Jaljala, a remote village in Nepal. Her journey in geospatial science began with an undergraduate degree in Geomatics Engineering from Kathmandu University, followed by a master’s degree in Geospatial Systems Engineering from Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi.
She is currently a PhD candidate in Geospatial Analytics at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on the geomorphic impacts of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, where I use LiDAR, UAV imagery, satellite data, and geospatial modeling to understand terrain change, debris movement, and altered drainage patterns after extreme events.
Through her work, she aims to develop geospatial methods and decision-support tools that can help communities, scientists, and emergency managers better prepare for, respond to, and recover from natural disasters.

Michelle combines passion and experience in public health, climate change, community development, food systems, and policy. her niche is in quantitative methods and urban data science, including GIS and machine learning/Artificial Intelligence applications. Her research interests are in health and the built environment, food systems, applied epidemiology for public policy, climate resiliency, community development and health disparities. Michelle aims to apply my work toward equitable people-based and place-based policies and interventions. Michelle holds a BS, MS, and MPA from the University of Delaware, and a PhD in Planning, Design, and Built Environment from Clemson University.

Gabrielle Capone is a senior a the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying Geography and GIS, with minors in Computer and Political Science. She channels her passion for global issues into action by leading Illinois YouthMappers and the Geographical Honors Society.
Caroline Petersen is a student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville pursuing a major in Geospatial Information Science and a minor in Data Science. She is a highly motivated and detail-oriented individual, passionate about the intersection of geospatial information science and environmental science.