Wes McRae | April 10, 2025 - Atlanta, GA

Continuing its commitment to addressing planning problems with cutting-edge technology, the School of City and Regional Planning recently hosted Paxton LaJoie to explore the intersection of remote sensing data applications and humanitarian initiatives. The guest lecture, open to the larger Georgia Tech community,  was part of Rounaq Basu's Remote Sensing course.

"Remote sensing is essentially taking things like satellite imagery, drone imagery, or any kind of hands-off data of the Earth, its surfaces and processes, and applying that to analyze whatever you might be interested in researching," LaJoie said. "This could mean looking at disaster response, assessing agricultural trends, trying to do urban planning, all kinds of things."

"It's a really great way to assess different communities either on really large scales, where you might not have the capacity to go in directly and get that data, or in sensitive areas, where you might not necessarily want to be on the ground or maybe people who live there don't want you in their community."

To illustrate the humanitarian applications, LaJoie described a case study from the Amazon rainforest in Madre de Dios, Peru, where illegal gold mining activities are ravaging the ecosystem. “They have a big problem with artisan gold mining. These miners illegally deforest the Amazon, flood the ground with water and lead, and extract gold in ways that devastate the environment."

"I was able to help with a project that identified areas of most concern for the gold mining and areas that have been damaged, all without further bothering communities who've already been mistreated in a number of ways, or adding to their struggles.”

People don't necessarily have a clear idea what remote sensing or GIS applications even are, LaJoie said, but realistically, people use these technologies every day. "Every time you open up Google Maps, you're using a GIS application. Every time you look at satellite imagery, that's all remote sensing."

"Now the average person can get an understanding of what's actually happening on the ground throughout the world. Like if you're hearing a lot about the California wildfires, for example, you might not really understand what that might look like. Now you can go online and see really high resolution satellite images and get a full understanding of the scope of things, whereas a few years ago, you might have just heard about it and then that would have been all you understood."

Along with the guest lecture, LaJoie sat down for a fireside chat with students interested in exploring remote sensing as a career field, reviewing unique tools and datasets leveraged to inform decision-making through geospatial analysis, the interest groups involved in large-scale research initiatives, and the career paths of the geospatial professionals involved.

"I think that sometimes students come into the field and they have a lot of interests that don't necessarily seem incredibly related. But realistically, any development you put into your own technical skill set, whether it's with something like coding or taking more civil engineering classes, will be worth the investment," LaJoie said. "Ultimately because those are interesting to you, it's going to be something that you want to have in your career path."

Paxton LaJoie is the GIS Specialist in Education and Practice at MIT Libraries, providing instruction on GIS and remote sensing applications to the MIT community. Prior to her role at MIT, Paxton served as the Center Lead at the Marshall Space Flight Center for NASA’s DEVELOP Program, applying NASA Earth Observations and remote sensing techniques to actionable environmental and community health concerns.