Christian Jacqz

Christian Jacqz has been Director of the Office of Geographic and Environmental Information in the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA) since 1992. This program, more commonly known as MassGIS, serves as a geographic information system resource for EOEA, other state agencies, regional and local governments and the private sector.

Since starting as an intern/programmer at MassGIS, Christian has been involved in a variety of GIS projects such as the statewide orthophoto layer, the completion of build-out analyses for all Mass. communities, development of a statewide protected open space inventory, creation of database/internet application for biodiversity surveys, creation/dissemination of watershed analysis software and development of a grant program and standards for municipal parcel mapping. Christian firmly believes that access to GIS should be freely and widely available, and has devoted considerable effort to providing free software/data packages and developing an Internet presence for MassGIS including a state-of-the-art open standard web mapping service.

Christian has delivered papers at the Northeast ArcInfo user group, the NE GIS annual conference and the national ESRI user conference as well as speaking at meetings sponsored by the Geographic Information Techology Association, the Massachusetts Watershed Coalition, Mass. Association of Conservation Commissions and Mass. Association of Land Trusts. He has also lectured at MIT, Harvard, Tufts and other area universities and at many other professional meeting and conference venues.

From 1973 to 1986, Christian had a construction business, specializing in alternative energy and solar work,. He then returned to graduate school and completed the coursework for civil engineering and urban/environmental planning degrees at Tufts. He is a volunteer for the Watertown ChildrenÕs Theatre and in the Watertown schools. He is also an enthusiastic sailor, kayaker and cross-country skier.