Staff Profiles

For Redistricting the Nation, Tamara developed and executed the analysis behind the compactness calculations and wrote much of the content for the website and white paper. She is currently overseeing development of a number of client projects, including a mobile indicators application for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), a watershed modeling application targeted at middle and high school students, and a collaborative destination discovery and trip planning tool.

Although she enjoys collaborating on web and mobile application design, Tamara feels lucky that she still gets to craft and hold a paper map every now and then.

Tamara received her undergraduate degree in Anthropology from Swarthmore College, but spent more time thinking about radio as a program director, station engineer and DJ for WSRN. She did graduate work in Geography at Temple University.

Tamara held an eclectic range of jobs prior to working at Azavea, including as an editor, an environmental advocate, a health care provider and a university teaching and research assistant. As a freelance GIS consultant, she worked on a project mapping data from the Blueprint for a Safer Philadelphia hotline and analyzing the relationship between caller needs, program locations, and target neighborhoods.

Tamara enjoys unlistenable music, unwatchable movies and incomprehensible theater, but draws the line at unpalatable food. She has a compulsion to travel and speaks bits of French, German, Indonesian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Portuguese; this is more a sign of her short attention span than any particular linguistic genius.

At Azavea, Tamara co-wrote "Redrawing the Map on Redistricting 2010" an update to and expansion of the company's 2006 "Gerrymandering Index" white paper.