Nathan is the Geospatial Services Librarian and an Associate Professor of Geography at Penn State. He leads the library’s Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps and Geospatial Information, where he promotes and facilitates spatial literacy and the use of maps and geospatial information and technologies across the university. His research interests and experiences are diverse and span the fields of geographic information science and remote sensing, historical cartography, landscape ecology and conservation, human geography and mapping, and academic librarianship.

He also co-edits the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries.

Prior to Nathan’s arrival at Penn State, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Montana State University, where he worked with the U.S. Department of Interior’s North Central Climate Science Center on the ecological impacts of climate and land use change in the Northern Rocky Mountains. He has a long history of working for and with the U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service and continues to be interested in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management in the context of global change, including how spatial and statistical modeling can provide decision-support in the face of scientific uncertainty.