R. Gil Pontius, Jr. :  A Talent for Maps and Models

Associate Professor R. Gil Pontius has long been intrigued by maps and statistics. “They seem like a natural combination,” he says, “and growing up in Pittsburgh, watching barges float iron ore to the mills, got me interested in the human uses of resources and the problems of location—in understanding why steel was made in Pittsburgh, near the coal mines and rivers, for example.” 

A faculty member in the GISDE Program, Pontius has blended his early interests into a specialty in statistics, environmental modeling and geographic information systems, seasoned by his Peace Corps experience in Africa. He is teaching the graduate GISDE 393 sequence and “Ecology and Economy of Third World Societies” this fall, plus courses on quantitative modeling and technology transfer next spring. 

After receiving a B.S. in mathematics and economics in 1984 from the University of Pittsburgh, Pontius served two years in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. In Morogoro he taught mathematics and coached debating at Kilakala Girls’ School, an A-level public school. 

“My students were extremely bright and driven,” he says. “Tanzania was at the beginning of a gender revolution, and these girls were the future of their country. It was also an education to tour local industries,” he adds, “because they took a blueprint of an industry created in Europe and dropped it without revision into East Africa, where the prices and inputs are different.” 

After the Peace Corps Pontius pursued his interest in applied statistics, earning a master’s degree at Ohio State in 1989.  “I see statistics as the link between mathematics and decision-making for real-life problems;” he says. “With statistics, you try to make the best decisions you can with the information available.” 

Pontius used his statistics expertise as a mathematical statistician for the Department of Agriculture, where he helped to design methods to create crop and livestock estimates using area sampling frames.  Upon receiving a Ph.D. in environmental science from the State University of New York in 1994, Pontius taught in the Geography Department and the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University. Most recently, he has worked at the Tellus Institute, a branch of the Stockholm Environment Institute, where he helped analyze environmental sustainability at a global level using the software PoleStar. 

Gil Pontius has created a computer model, Geomod2, which analyzes land use patterns and extrapolates them into the future, using statistical analysis to evaluate the results.  He has used Geomod2 in a Department of Energy project to simulate how humans change the landscape in the tropics, particularly in Africa, Asia and Costa Rica, and to estimate the resulting carbon dioxide release. He also is examining biodiversity and land use in India to predict species that are threatened by deforestation. For Oxfam America, he is creating scenarios of land use change in Peru and Bolivia under industrial and local management. 

“My students can jump right into these projects and learn applied aspects of GIS and qualitative analysis,” notes Pontius. “Problems become more complex when you consider the social, economic and political elements, so students need to tap their creativity when there are no straightforward answers.  I hope my students will become quantitatively sophisticated and qualitatively knowledgeable.” 

Pontius exhibits his own creativity beyond GIS: he is a professional juggler and in 1996 won the People’s Choice Award in international competition. He completed the Boston Marathon in 1998 as a “joggler,” running while juggling the entire route.