Bio

Kevin Haynes is the University of South Carolina's first Geospatial Information Officer, responsible for the enterprise spatial data infrastructure that supports decision-making across the institution. He established USC's first geospatial data governance framework, led the enterprise ArcGIS implementation now used across nearly every major operational unit on campus, and secured the executive sponsorship and recurring institutional funding behind it. His work treats spatial data not as a mapping service but as institutional infrastructure: the location layer that ties facilities, planning, compliance, and operations to a single authoritative source.

He came to higher education from state government and military geospatial operations. As a GIS analyst and later Environmental GIS Manager with the South Carolina National Guard, he built the geospatial decision-support system that coordinated the state's pandemic response, integrating data from the National Guard, DHEC, the Emergency Management Division, and hospital systems to support testing, vaccination, and resource allocation across all 46 counties and more than 800 testing-site missions. He later directed geospatial operations across more than 20,000 acres of military training land under the Department of Defense REPI program.

Haynes holds an MS in Geography, a Master of Public Administration, and a BA in Philosophy from Western Michigan University. He teaches geospatial technology in the Department of Geography. He writes and speaks about geospatial work as an institutional practice: how spatial data systems are built, governed, and trusted inside complex organizations

Teaching

• GEOG 105: Digital Earth
• GEOG 263: Geographic Information Systems 
• GEOG 310: WebGIS Studio