The Taylor Geospatial Institute (TGI), a St. Louis research institute launched in 2022 to focus on geospatial technology, has added a former Amazon Web Services executive to its team.
TGI, located at Saint Louis University, said Tuesday that Mark Korver has been hired as its new director of geospatial data and analytics. He previously was worldwide tech lead for geospatial with Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of e-commerce and tech company Amazon that supplies cloud computing services.
In his more than a dozen years with AWS, Korver also served as senior business development manager for geospatial and government and education senior solution architect, according to his LinkedIn profile. He worked with organizations worldwide to help modernize and optimize their infrastructure and share geospatial data on the cloud, officials said in a press release.
Kover also previously was founder and CTO of a Japan-based web application development company Alchemedia Inc. and director of geospatial business development for Iowa-based Aerial Services Inc., among other posts, according to LinkedIn.
TGI, a consortium of eight research institutions, is aimed at expanding St. Louis' position as a hub of geospatial research and innovation.
In his new post with TGI, Korver will help build out shared data and analytic services to help stakeholders get to market more quickly with new ideas, officials said in the release. He will provide data collection, storage and analysis services to the organization's consortium, as well as support new TGI initiatives in areas including food security and geospatial AI (geoAI), officials said.
“Welcoming Mark into the TGI team says a lot about how we think about cloud-native geospatial, open data and open science, and the opportunity to do good things in AI in collaboration with others around the world,” TGI's executive director, Nadine Alameh, said in a statement.
“During my 12+ years at AWS, mostly as a solution architect and more recently as a business development manager for the Aerospace and Satellite team, I’ve been lucky to work with many customers and colleagues doing amazing things that would not be possible in a traditional data center environment,” Korver said in a statement. “I look forward to applying what I have learned, to enable continued growth for TGI and its member organizations.”
TGI's launch in 2022 was funded through a “legacy investment” from Andy Taylor, executive chairman of Clayton-based rental car giant Enterprise Mobility, formerly known as Enterprise Holdings, and capital from its eight members. Its member institutions are the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Harris-Stowe State University, Missouri University of Science & Technology, Saint Louis University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Missouri-St. Louis and Washington University.
TGI is targeting research around the topics of food security, geospatial science and computation, health care and national security.
