Welcome to the home page of Tim Mulrooney.  This page is meant to house resources and related material for the Center for Community Safety at Winston-Salem State University. 

I earned my Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York City.  While at Columbia, I was a member of the wrestling team.  After graduating from Columbia, I taught at the John Carroll School, a co-educational private high school located in Bel Air, Maryland.  After teaching mathematics for 2 years, I was asked to teach 2 courses in earth science and another course in Computer Science.  Those classes, combined with my night studies in the Master’s Program in Computer Science at Loyola College in Baltimore, introduced me to the field of GIS and digital mapping.  In anticipation of earning my Master’s Degree in computer science in 1999, I applied to a number of graduate schools with a hope of marrying my computer science training with current digital mapping techniques.  I was accepted and eventually enrolled in the graduate program for Geography in the Fall of 1999 at the University of Idaho.

Much of my studies at the University of Idaho revolved around cartography, GIS and Remote Sensing technology and the programming languages to help automate digital map creation.  For my thesis, I looked more specifically at Internet mapping technology and the manner in which digital maps are rendered in the Web environment.  I eventually created a digital mapping application that created custom maps based on used-defined data.   This was done using the Java and JavaScript programming languages.  I also taught at the Potlatch Jr-Sr High School while finishing up my thesis during the 2001- 2002 school year.  In addition to my teaching duties at Potlatch, I also served as an assistant wrestling coach and head track and field coach. In wrestling, we had a state runner-up in the Idaho State 2A-1A championships who later started for Boise State University.  In track and field, we had 3 state qualifiers for the state 2A track and field meet.  Two of these athletes (a boy and a girl) both finished 2nd in the triple jump.  

In September of 2002,  I was lucky enough to gain employment working with the Army at Fort A.P. Hill.  The goal of our office was to create mapping products and perform spatial analysis so that military trainers can work hand-in-hand with environmental specialists at U.S. Army installations throughout the world.  In addition to my mapping duties, I gave a variety of GIS technical workshops and talks to military and lay personnel about the increasingly popular field of GIS, its applications and future use as it applies to the Army.  I also managed a 12 Tb server which stored our spatial and aspatial assets that could be served to various government agencies, subcontractors and more than 120 military installations throughout the world.  I also served as an adjunct instructor in the geography department at Germanna Community College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  Much of my teaching revolved around quantitative methods used to express geographic phenomena, usually in the form of maps, charts and graphs. I have a vested interest in GIS, terrain modeling, GIS education and subject areas in which GIS can be implemented at the college level.  I moved to North Carolina to attend the University of North Carolina, Greensboro in 2007 and graduated in December 2009.

At UNCG, my PhD dissertation focus was on using open source programming and data mining techniques to assess GIS metadata integrity for large databases.  In my work experience,  I have seen an increasing schism between the rate at which data are created and the rate at which data are catalogued.  At Fort A.P. Hill, our GIS database consisted of more than 5,000 layers.  Each metadata file contains more than 400 individual elements. Efficiently extracting information from this metadata is an impossibility and little research has been done in the science of metadata and automating metadata.  Turning this plethora of data into tangible action is an impossibility given the sheer size of data sets.  My research explores methodology within the open source environment in which data can be turned into information that supports the decision-making process. 

Outside of my school, teaching and work duties, most of my free time is dedicated to my 7 year-old daughter, Roxanna.  I also enjoy traveling.  A couple of my favorite places are Moab, Mt. Rainier, Isle Royale, the Caribbean and Italy.  I currently compete in marathons and triathlons.  I have run the New York City Marathon three times and recently ran a 3:30 marathon at the Charlotte Marathon, my personal record.