For the past several years, Dr. Freddie E. Wills, Jr., Ph.D., has been on a mission to put Harris-Stowe State University’s geospatial science and technology program on the map.
As the school’s vice president of STEM Initiatives and Research Partnerships, Dr. Wills has played a crucial role in adding STEM courses to the curriculum at Harris-Stowe, a historically Black university founded in St. Louis in 1857. His goal isn’t just to grow the program, though, but also to make it the premier Historically Black College and University (HBCU) for geospatial science and technology in the U.S.
As part of that goal, every summer, students from HBCUs across the U.S. travel to St. Louis for the Immersion in GEOINT program at Harris-Stowe. The four-week program is led by Dr. Wills, with support from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). During the month of July, students attend intensive sessions across St. Louis designed to “develop geospatial intelligence interest and skills in students from the nation’s HBCUs,” according to the NGA.
This summer marks the program’s fifth cohort, with 20 students representing 13 unique HBCUs, including Morehouse College, Spelman College, Howard University, and Hampton University.
Dr. Wills says that after investing in these students and their geospatial education and careers over the past few years, he’s beginning to see the next generation of mapping talent graduate into the workforce. “We’re at the point where we’re starting to see results,” he says. “With a program like this, your outputs are sometimes delayed because you’re working with students that are rising sophomores, rising juniors, rising seniors. We’re now seeing students entering internships in the industry and startups, and we’re seeing them start to go to graduate school in the geospatial field.”
We recently caught up with Dr. Wills to learn more about the 2026 cohort, how the program has grown over the past few years, and how it has positioned Harris-Stowe and St. Louis as a destination for geospatial education and career pathways.
This Q&A has been condensed and edited for clarity by Liz Miller. Photos by Michael Thomas.
Tell us about some of the milestones you’ve celebrated with the program in the past few years.
Recently, we received the award of accreditation from the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), so our GEOINT certificate is now accredited by the foundation. We are now one of only 25 institutions that has this specific designation for the GEOINT certificate. In the state of Missouri, we are the third college on the list. And then from an HBCU standpoint, we will be one of three, I believe, that has this specific designation from USGIF as well.
Last year, Esri bestowed upon us the Special Achievement in GIS Award; they call it the SAG Awards, a coveted award, and we were awarded that for the work that we’ve been doing in the HBCU immersion project. Esri has been a major supporter of the program and we’ve had a lot of success with them.
And last year we also visited, for the second year, the American Geographical Society‘s Geo 2050 conference that was held in New York on the campus of Columbia University. And what we did last year, not only did we participate in the conference, all of our students’ presentations were accepted as posters for their symposium portion of the conference. So the five presentations we had from 2024 all were turned into poster presentations for this conference, and all those students were able to attend and present their work at this conference as well. And it was a great opportunity.
It was also like a reunion of the students because it happened in November. They were all together in the summer, and then we had our reunion in November and it was great. Everybody’s back together like old friends again and really excited to see each other and they had a great three days in New York working on the projects. So it’s been wonderful.
Can you share any examples of internships or full-time jobs past program participants have landed in the geospatial field?
Some of the places that the students that have moved on have gone to, Esri, we have a student who landed an internship with Esri last year. Hopefully that internship turns into a permanent job this year, because that student is at the graduating stage this year.
A company that’s here in St. Louis, T-Kartor, we’ve had students land internships and also permanent roles with T-Kartor. We have a couple of students this year that are participating in the internship and a student did it last year and got a job as well. We’ve had students land NGA internships.
We’ve had students move on to grad school to North Carolina State for their GIS program; this fall, we’ll have two students there participating in their program. We also have a student that’s with Northwest Missouri State in their graduate program for GIS.
For students who are interested in joining a future cohort, what types of undergrad majors are common for entry into the geospatial field?
When I look at the list of students that we have, we’re finding students from all sorts of majors: engineering, computer science, communication, psychology, biology, mechanical engineering. So it’s not all just STEM majors; we have some accounting majors, economics majors.
There’s three areas that all students are working towards or should be working towards improving themselves in and developing in themselves while they’re in college.
The first one is going to be critical thinking. This program is going to get youengage knee deep in a critical thinking project that’s going to help you enhance your skill sets in that space. And you’re going to need critical thinking abilities in order to produce a culminating project that’s actually good.
The second one is communications — understanding how to communicate things concisely, how to communicate things that gives you all of the factual information right there, in one setting.
And then that third piece is going to be that they’re working in teams. For four weeks, the students come together, but no one really knows each other outside of the ones that may go to the same institution. And even with that case, I’ve learned that they don’t even know each other when I have students, maybe two or three from the same place.So you have to come together and in a quick setting, gel with your new team and you have to work on a project that’s demanding with a new set of people that you know nothing about. And once you get into the workforce, this is your life every day.
So critical thinking, communications, and working in teams: with those three pieces, that’s what we want to enhance in the students while giving them a skill set in geospatial intelligence.
Whether you’re a STEM major, whether you’re a liberal arts major, you have to use all of those things in every field that you go into.
And tell us a little about what the students studied in the program this summer.
What the students are doing, in essence, is we’re taking a skill set from NGA, giving it to them, and showing them how NGA does briefings to people like the House Intelligence Committee, the President, the Vice President. And so the students are learning like, ‘OK, if it’s 8:30 in the morning, you just got to work, but all of a sudden you got called to give a briefing to the President about this specific project, in this area, and the President wants to know what’s happening between Russia and Africa. So you have to go and get the briefing.’ So their culminating projects are briefings in the way that we teach them to construct it is the manner that NGA would then brief people on projects that they’re working on.
The particular problem sets that we work on every year are actual live problem sets that the NGA are working on themselves. And so we work with people from the NGA research division: They craft a problem set for us to contribute to projects that they are currently working on. So this is a project we continue to focus on the continent of Africa, but also continue to focus on what’s happening between Russia and Africa. What is Russia doing in Africa? Why are they doing it? How are they doing it? Where are they doing it? And how is it impacting Africa as a whole?
They choose a country on the continent of Africa, and they will follow the promptbased on that country. So, for example, Tanzania may be the country, and the students will then start sourcing Tanzania to understand what mineral projects Russia has going on there. Are they happening inland? Are they happening on the water? And they start to design maps that will give you an idea of what’s happening in that country through Russia. So it’s really an opportunity for them to learn the uses of geospatial intelligence, learn the uses of ArcGIS, which is the Esri product, and then we’ll be using open-source data as well to contribute to this effort.
Walk us through the types of sessions the students experienced this summer, and which partner institutions they visited.
We kick off with an introduction to NGA — we visit the new NGA site and get a tour of the facilities. And we get a history of NGA itself, and a history of geospatial intelligence.
We then move from NGA to the introduction to Esri in the ArcGIS software, which is our major tool for this program. We have people from Esri come in and lead a two-day training session on the software. And so we’re really taking a lot of students that are novices at ArcCIS and within four weeks giving them a good foundational skill set in how to use that tool.
We also engage students with GeoSTL to learn about what they’re doing here in the St. Louis community, the ecosystem, and how the work is supporting the development of more geospatial industries and startups.
We will also be taking them over to the Bowman Company here in St. Louis to check out some of the things that they use geospatial tools for within like their aviation space — how they’re using drones to do what they do. They do a lot of Lidar sensing work at that company.
We will again have Saint Louis University a part of it; Dr. Vasik Sagan, a good friend of mine, he’s going to continue to explore the remote sensing areas with them so they have an understanding of remote sensing, which highly relies on Lidar technology to get its work done.
And then Tanya Wilkerson, who for the past two years led the keynote of the closing ceremony while she was serving as the deputy director of the NGA, she has developed a team of retired senior executives that are going to come in and work with the students in week three toward the development of their culminating project. So these will be senior execs, former senior execs from NGA, and the CIA as well. They’re going to work with them on what are the important things to have in your briefing and how to present it. So it’s going to be a great group of people that have great experience in geospatial science, technology, geospatial intelligence, and the students will get a chance to enjoy all of those connections.
Tell us about the Esri User Conference you and the students attended in San Diego, California.
That is always a highlight of the program. What’s amazing about this is this is where the students get to see it all take shape and open up. And this is where they also get to see, ‘Oh, here’s my space in this field,’ because the Users Conference brings people from around the globe that use the ArcGIS process to do geospatial work. And they have people from every different sector, every walk of life, that are doing this work. So as the students, especially once they get to the expo floors of these major conferences, Esri does a really good job of branding the expo for, it may say like transportation and logistics, human resources, communications, education, urban planning, they have all these signs up that marks like in this area, these are the type of professionals you’ll find.
So as the students are walking through, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, we didn’t know that this crossed so many different platforms.’ You don’t have to be a specialist in a STEM field, you could take this tool and apply it to many different settings. There’s a big health care or health sciences area, public health area. And so the students, once they get to the expo floor, they really start to find like, ‘Huh, this really is a field that I could get into with my current degree without changing my focus of my major. And I have a niche that not everyone has. I could take that niche and do the work that I would like to do.’ So, you know, anytime you can get an opportunity to put students in front of different careers that they don’t think about on a day-to-day basis is great because the lightbulb goes off.
As an educator, what does it mean to you to make that kind of difference in the lives of young people?
For me, it’s really about the access to give students a pathway for a career. The work that we’re doing is giving young people access to a career field, access to a tool that they could take anywhere with them and use it for good, whether they just get into it and enjoy mapping and want to be a part of the mapping community, or just enjoy it as a hobby.
And then also the community that is built in the four weeks with the students as well, because they become a close-knit group over the four-week process. You watch them go from, ‘Who is that person?’ To them opening up to each other, gelling together, becoming close friends. For me, it’s a humbling experience. I look at it like, ‘Hey, I have an opportunity to share something great with these young people. And by sharing it, I may help them find their way in life.’ And that really resonates with me. That’s the work of the heart. And when you find people two years, three years later that see you and they’re like, ‘Hey, I really enjoyed the program and this is what I’m doing now because of the program’…
I was in Denver back in March, and I didn’t know this, but as I got there, a student from the program last year greeted me because he had gotten a golden ticket from GEOINT, and he only learned of it because of the program. And he was all involved in the conference as one of the student supporters. And then last summer, when we went to the Esri Users Conference, I got a text message from a student that was a part of the 2024 cohort. He’s like, ‘Dr. Wills, I’m at the Users Conference. Are you here?’ And he told me, and he’s interning with Esri this summer. That’s the work that really makes you go, ‘Wow, the work you’re doing is making a difference.’
Why, in your opinion, are programs like this so key to developing talent and then workforce for the geospatial industry?
I think they’re important because all students come to college with untamed expectations. Being immersed in a program like this that’s going to show them different pathways for careers.
And the importance of it as well is that not only are we building and developing talent for the geospatial space, it is also the diversity of the talent that you’re able to bring to the table through these programs because they do wonders for the workforce. One thing we always hear from students once they graduate from college, everyone’s telling me, I need experience, I need more experience. Well, this is something that you could point to to say, I have experience in geospatial science. I’ve done this. I’ve used the ArcGIS tool. I’ve done a briefing myself. I’ve done this work. And when you get that from a student that’s looking to now find their first job, it really makes a difference from them. So these types of programs are very important for the workforce and for career exploration.
What does it mean to Harris-Stowe to offer this program to students across the country, and right here in St. Louis?
Harris-Stowe would not be in this field of study if it wasn’t for what’s happening in St. Louis, with NGA opening up his new space, with this major initiative to be the global epicenter of geospatial science. If that wasn’t happening, we wouldn’t be here. Because it is happening, it gives Harris-Stowe a lane and a space to say, ‘We have to contribute to this initiative for St. Louis. Not only do we have to contribute to it for St. Louis, we have to contribute to it for the population of students that we serve.’ Because if we want to see them in spaces like NGA, spaces like Esri, GDIT, T Carter, or Scale AI, all of these companies here, if we want to see Harris-Stowe representation in those companies, we need to build pathways for those students to go there.
And overall as well, when you talk about it city wise and diversity wise, without Harris-Stowe, you don’t get some of that diversity at the table. And our reach, by offering this program to HBCUs across the country so students can come to St. Louis, see the community, live in the community, see what we’re doing in this space, it gives Harris-Stowe a critical role in the development of the geospatial talent in St. Louis. And that’s really important. And as an HBCU, my goal since we’ve been in this initiativehas been to grow Harris-Stowe to be the premier HBCU for geospatial science and technology. And I believe we’re there.