About the lab
The Georgetown Spatial Policy Lab is a student research group at Georgetown University. Members learn GIS and use it on a policy question they care about. What the analysis turns up gets published here.
- Founded
- 2026
- Based at
- Georgetown University, Washington, DC
- Structure
- Student run, with project teams of four to five members
- Prerequisites
- None. Training is part of membership.
- Output
- Policy briefs, research papers, and published maps
What we are
Georgetown has no shortage of clubs that discuss world politics. This one is meant to produce something you can look at. Members get trained on geographic information systems and then point them at questions that have an answer on a map: which populations actually fall inside a policy's reach, or where a supply route is exposed.
Almost every serious policy question has a location attached to it, and most of the people arguing about those questions cannot open the data. That gap is the reason the lab exists. We are not a geography club and we are not a coding club. We sit between the two.
How the lab is organized
There are two halves. The first is open to the whole membership: workshops, software trainings, talks from people who use GIS professionally, and the ordinary social side of a student organization. Anyone who joins can show up to these and learn the tools.
The second half is the research side. Members are placed on small project teams, usually four or five people, each with a project lead who reports to the executive team. Teams work through a semester on one regional or thematic question. The teams are where the published work comes from.
What a semester looks like
A team gets a question and starts with background reading, because you cannot map a policy problem you do not understand. From there it moves into data collection and the first round of GIS work. Progress goes to the executive team through the project lead, so nobody disappears for three months and resurfaces with nothing.
General meetings run in parallel. Those are for training, guest talks, and updates from each team so the rest of the membership knows what is being built. The semester closes with a symposium where teams present and take questions, and the finished work is published afterward.
What gets published
The baseline is a set of data visualizations that answer the question a team was given. Beyond that it depends on the team. Some write a research paper covering the history of an issue and its present implications. Others write a policy brief with empirical recommendations attached. Both end up in the research archive under the names of the people who did the work.
Maps that stand on their own, without a full paper behind them, go to the Atlas and the Map Wall. Shorter write-ups explaining a single map are filed as posts.
What we work on
Most projects are national or international in scope. Restricting the lab to Washington would be too narrow for the questions members actually want to work on. That said, one or two DC-area projects a year are worth running: local data is clean and public, the results are checkable, and it is possible to put the findings in front of the officials they concern.
The lab leans academic rather than activist. Work that connects to social impact is welcome, but the standard a project is held to is whether the analysis holds up.
Who can join
Any Georgetown undergraduate, from any school and any year. GIS experience is not expected and neither is a background in political science. People come for different parts of it. Some want the environmental work, some want the Python and the data, and some want the contact with faculty and professionals who do this for a living.
Recruitment happens at the start of each semester. Details and the interest form are on the membership page.
Faculty and the university
Administration stays with students. Georgetown already teaches upper-level GIS coursework, and the lab is working on getting faculty involved in the research itself. How formal that ends up being is still open.
Where things stand
The lab is new. The first full cohort starts in Fall 2026, and the site you are reading is where its work will be published. Two research projects are already underway.