About the Author

Joel Lawhead is a project management institute-certified Project Management Professional (PMP), certified GIS Professional (GISP), and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of NVision Solutions Inc., an award-winning firm that specializes in geospatial technology integration and sensor engineering.

Joel began using Python in 1997 and started combining it with geospatial software development in 2000. He is the author of the first edition of Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python and QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, both by Packt Publishing. His Python cookbook recipes were featured in two editions of Python Cookbook, O'Reilly Media. He is also the developer of the widely-used, open source Python Shapefile Library (PyShp). He maintains the geospatial technical blog http://geospatialpython.com/ and the Twitter feed, @SpatialPython, which discusses the use of the Python programming language in the geospatial industry.

In 2011, Joel reverse-engineered and published the undocumented shapefile spatial indexing format and assisted fellow geospatial Python developer, Marc Pfister, in reversing the algorithm used, allowing developers around the world to create better-integrated and more robust geospatial applications.

Joel serves as the lead architect, project manager, and co-developer for geospatial applications used by U.S. government agencies, including NASA, FEMA, NOAA, the U.S. Navy, and many other commercial and non-profit organizations. In 2002, he received the international Esri Special Achievement in GIS award for his work on the Real-Time Emergency Action Coordination Tool (REACT), for emergency management using geospatial analysis.