Roland Martin is the Geospatial & Earth Observation Skills Leader for the Americas at Arup. He has 18 years of experience in geospatial and digital consulting. By trade he is a Spatial Data Engineer, but he has always valued versatility, and at different times in his career has built up experience with data collection, management, analysis, visualization, and automation.
Thanks to a misspent childhood spent doodling maps and reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Roland always dreamed of becoming a geographer. He has spent all of his career to date working for the engineering consultancy Arup, a role which has enabled him to travel the world, starting as a GIS Consultant in the north of England, before moving to Los Angeles, Singapore, and then back to Los Angeles.
He is proud to have contributed to exciting projects including the Forth Replacement Crossing north of Edinburgh, the Antwerp Scheldt Crossing Study, and other major projects across the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. It was the California High Speed Rail project which brought him to the west coast when he was offered a role as GIS Manager for one of the segments in 2010.
Roland enjoys hiking, cycling, archive television, and dull and pretentious foreign language films. He is fascinated by music technology and owns some rare and unusual equipment including two circular synthesizers, two home-made Theremins, and a Japanese vinyl lathe for making your own records that sound terrible.
After many years as a technical expert in the consulting world, Roland has spent the last five years in more of a management role and has developed strong opinions about the transition. This change, coupled with the professional isolation of repeated lockdowns, led to him joining the CGIA board in 2022. He is still looking forward to riding the train across California in under three hours.