Benjamin Lewis

Ben Lewis works on open infrastructure for machine-actionable spatial data and auditable spatial inference systems. His current work focuses on improving support for spatio-temporal data and machine-readable metadata in research repositories such as Harvard Dataverse, to make spatial data easier to find, reuse, and incorporate into reproducible workflows.

Ben spent much of his professional career at Harvard's Center for Geographic Analysis, initially as a spatial data scientist and later as a technology manager.  His teams designed and developed a range of widely used open spatial platforms, datasets, and research infrastructure.

Before Harvard, Ben worked on geospatial initiatives in the public and private sectors. After completing a Master’s in Environmental Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, he helped start the UC Berkeley GIS Lab, established the GIS group at the transportation firm McCormick Taylor, and coordinated the Land Acquisition Mapping System for the South Florida Water Management District. Ben studied Chinese at the University of Wisconsin.

Ben is particularly interested in technologies that lower barriers to spatial data access and enable large-scale, collaborative analysis of the physical world.