Carson is part of the Textile.IO team, working on developer tools for encrypted, recoverable, schema-based, and cross-application data storage built on IPFS and libp2p. He was previously a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he focused on spatial-temporal analysis and data-intensive modeling of dynamic geographical processes. His research tends to fall under the general banner of 'computational GIScience’ and encompasses work on networks, transportation, big data, snow/water processes, and geospatial algorithms. 

Prior to joining the faculty at Colorado, he was Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information (CARSI) and Assistant Professor of GIScience at Hunter College of the City University of New York. In 2012, he held a postdoctoral position at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and in 2011 he completed a PhD funded by the Irish Social Sciences Platform (ISSP) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada at the National Center for Geocomputation at the University of Maynooth (formerly National University of Ireland Maynooth) in Ireland. Both his undergraduate and Masters were completed in the Geography Department at the University of Victoria, in B.C. Canada (my hometown). He is a strong advocate for open source software and open data and enjoys cycling, snowboarding, and collecting robots.