GAIA Lab in St. Louis Helps Train Geomatics Workforce of the Future

GAIA Lab students present their projects at Moonshot Labs. GAIA Lab students have a presentation requirement, said NGA's Jamie Roberts, which helps them become comfortable speaking about their work in front of a crowd and improves communication and understanding for all members of the lab. Photo by NGA.

"Whether the student then applies to NGA to try and become full-time, or they take their new skills with them onto further education and or jobs, the student has benefited from the experience as well as NGA," King said. "GAIA Lab is a great way to give students in the St. Louis area a chance to work on hard STEM problems, build their research capabilities, and learn to work in a collaborative lab environment."

This year, 10 students from colleges in St. Louis are working at GAIA Lab: 8 from UMSL (four undergraduate physics majors, three undergraduate computer science majors and one graduate computer science student); one physics undergraduate student at Saint Louis University; and one undergraduate mathematics student from Harris-Stowe State University.
GAIA Lab students are hired for an entire academic year, including summers, or until they graduate.

"They can work up to 24 hours per week, and two-thirds of their time must be done in-person at Moonshot labs," King said. "This model truly gets the students embedded in our mission and enables them to contribute meaningful work."

In addition to King, seven other NGA scientists work with and mentor students at GAIA Lab on various unclassified projects of interest to NGA, including AI Gravity, AI Crustal Magnetism, Gravity Modeling Enhancement, AI Levee Detection and AI Cloud Detection. GAIA Lab works many of those projects in collaboration with professionals at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

GAIA Lab currently is working with 10 students from colleges in the St. Louis area: the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Saint Louis University and Harris-Stowe State University. Photo by NGA.

NGA geodetic earth scientist and GAIA Lab mentor Marlie Mollett said GAIA Lab works similar to how an academic research lab works. NGA project mentors work with ORNL, NRL and NOAA and help lead and develop the more advanced portions of the research. Students do the beginner-level tasks, like data prep, until they are ready to work on more difficult research problems within their projects, said Mollett.

"The GAIA students perform different tasks, such as data evaluation, converting code from ORNL codebase to NGA platform and repurposing code for other projects, and then share their work with their NGA mentors," said Mollett. "The mentors in turn can share the results with ORNL and NRL to see what would be useful for the project at that time, whether on the NGA side or the collaborators side."

GAIA Lab student Adam Becker, who graduated in December with an undergraduate degree in computer science at UMSL, worked at GAIA Labs on the AI Gravity project to develop an AI technique to best estimate gravitational anomalies on the earth's surface to improve navigation. Becker said he and his team quality-checked data points to ensure the AI would produce an accurate representation of the gravity grid, and updated code to speed up processing time.

"The scale of the AI Gravity project was much greater than any project I had ever worked on," said Becker. He also said he gained confidence taking on tasks that seemed daunting at first and then seeing them through.

GAIA Lab student Jacob Arbogast, an UMSL physics major, also worked on the AI Gravity project. "The most rewarding part has been working with data no one has really touched before, and doing something new with it," said Arbogast. "It's real science, not just a proof of concept on some science that's already been done for years."

But students' work at GAIA Lab goes beyond sitting in front of a computer. For example, students have a presentation requirement, said Jamie Roberts, NGA geodetic scientist and GAIA Lab mentor. This helps them become comfortable speaking about their work in front of a crowd, she said, and improves communication and understanding for all members of the lab.

"It helps them learn their project at a deeper level, since we ask them questions after each presentation," said Roberts, "and keeps all of the interns up-to-date on each other's projects so they can help one another."

Becker said this was his biggest challenge during his time at GAIA Lab.

"I am naturally soft-spoken, and it took a lot of growth for me just to stand in front of the group of mentors and other students for progress reports every other week," Becker said. "I was able to get more comfortable through practice and went on to present my work in front of more people at the GEOINT Symposium."

While preparing students for geoscience careers, GAIA Lab also helps them develop their understanding of various career paths.

Zach Weiss, a senior physics major at UMSL, said his experience at GAIA labs has helped him understand what skills and education are needed for different positions. "I also understand myself better, as far as what work I actually enjoy," Weiss said.

And for some GAIA Lab students, the experience has led them to a career at NGA. Mollett, the first student King mentored in 2020, now works full-time at NGA and is a GAIA Lab mentor herself. Xavier Gobble, another GAIA Lab student and an UMSL senior studying physics, will join NGA for a full-time position in Source this summer, working the same topic he tackled as a GAIA Lab student, AI Crustal Magnetism.

The AI Crustal Magnetism project aims to develop machine-learning techniques to predict crustal magnetic anomaly values. "A complete crustal magnetic anomaly map can be used for navigation when GPS is unavailable," Gobble said. "This alternative method of navigation will benefit those on the field, which benefits our national security."
Gobble said that before working at GAIA Lab, he was not quite sure of his career direction.

"Getting firsthand experience researching, and having the opportunity to discuss the future with people in the prime of their careers, provides a great deal of career perspective," he said.

Growing the next generation of geomatics professionals is a long-standing need for the agency and for the United States (Geomatics is vital to US national security; our advantage is at risk). Geomatics underpins much of what NGA does, said King. Despite this need, many U.S. STEM students are not aware of opportunities in the field of geomatics.

Exposure is vital, said King. That is why, in 2020, King reached out to UMSL's Department of Physics and Astronomy about inviting UMSL students to tackle an AI Gravity research project with NGA. Through the University of Missouri system's Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NGA, Mollett, then an UMSL student, began work with NGA.

In January 2022, NGA provided seed funding through a Partner Intermediary Agreement with T-REX innovation center to develop an official program modeled off the work done from the CRADA and directly fund students' work, said King. The GAIA Lab was born.

Mollett helped King further develop the GAIA Lab initiative, turning Mollett's experience into a program for multiple students and with opportunities to work on different NGA projects. In 2023, the program expanded to six students. To help the program continue to develop, GAIA Lab was moved under a contract with Geomatics Emerging Scientist Consortium for Education, Research and Capabilities Enhancement in 2024.

"I now mentor students, like Dawn did for myself," said Mollett. "GAIA Lab has proven to be a great way to give students in the local St. Louis area a chance to work on hard STEM problems, build their research capabilities and learn to work in a collaborative lab environment."