Team
Jeff Terstriep, President
Jeff Terstriep is President of LEAMgroup and leads the company's software development efforts related to land use modeling and planning and decision support systems. Jeff has over 20 years of experience in Information Systems, High Performance Computing, and Software Development. He utilizes his experience in information management and complex computing tasks to assist clients in implementing new technologies in planning. He has recently focused on developing tools for the interactive display of regional land use data via the Internet. Jeff has also worked as a consultant to the Army Corps of Engineer's Construction Engineering Research Laboratory, assisting in the design and development of a decision support system known as Fort Future.
Prior to LEAMgroup, Jeff served as Associate Director for Computing and Communications at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where he managed a 60-member technical staff responsible for the supercomputer environment, networking infrastructure, web and database systems, visualization and virtual reality environments, and desktop support.
Dr. Brian Deal, Founder, Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
Brian Deal is Cofounder, Chairman, and Principal Scientist for LEAMgroup, Inc. Dr. Deal's background is a unique mix of professional activities and academic achievement with a focus on urban and regional planning, sustainability, and environmental ethics. Dr. Deal was one of the original developers of the Land use Evolution and impact Assessment Model (LEAM) used by LEAMgroup.
As Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Deal teaches multi-disciplinary sustainable design studio and seminar courses. His scholarship and research activities at University of Illinois have evolved in two substantive areas: 1) facility sustainability in the form of the Smart Energy and the development of programs that work toward the infusion of renewable energy technologies in the State of Illinois; and 2) landscape sustainability in the development and application of the LEAM land use change model.
Dr. Varkki George Pallathucheril, Founder, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
Dr. Varkki George Pallathucheril is a Director of LEAMgroup and a Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the American University of Sharjah. Until 2008, Varkki was an Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has over a decade of experience developing and applying planning support systems, computer-based tools that facilitate the work of urban and regional planners. Varkki is one of the principal investigators responsible for the development of the Land use Evolution and impact Assessment Model (LEAM) at the University of Illinois and Director of the Design+Digital Rehearsal Studio. He has been engaged since 1998 in developing LEAM with particular emphasis on the visualization of dynamic spatial data. This work includes designing and developing Web-based interfaces to data, map-based representation, and immersive three-dimensional representations in the CUBE at the Beckman Institute Illinois Simulator Laboratory.
Laura Kinsell-Baer, Senior Planner
Laura Kinsell-Baer has been with LEAMgroup since 2006, acting as the liaison between regional planning clients and new technologies that are designed to assist clients in the decision-making process and facilitate partners' planning efforts. A graduate of the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior program of the University of Minnesota and subsequently, the Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of Illinois, Laura's interests lie in the interactions between human-made and influenced environments and the elements of nature that dictate those environments. As a graduate student in urban planning, Laura worked on a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy-funded project to generate alternative visualization methods as tools to discover and communicate new planning ideas, using the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as an example. Laura continues to strive toward improving the effectiveness of implementing new tools in multi-agency planning.
