Geographer · GeoAI Director · Studio Founder

Not all data that wanders is lost

I'm a geographer who builds spatial applications for complex datasets. PhD in Geography from Kentucky, Director of Geospatial Technology & GeoAI at GeoConvergence — and founder of NeverLost, a studio that turns messy public data into clear geographic insight.

PhD Geography · U of Kentucky MS Forestry · U of Kentucky BS Geoscience · U of Louisville GIS & Remote Sensing GeoAI AWS 350+ citations
Michael Shouse, PhD
Director, Geospatial Technology & GeoAI
GeoConvergence

Founder, NeverLost Studio
Shouse Solutions LLC
Louisville, KY
350+ citations
neverlost.studio
Selective · Open to conversation

NeverLost Studio

Geospatial applications for datasets that reward exploration

A family of mapping products built on the same methodology — take a rich public dataset, find the spatial signal in it, and make the insight accessible. Each app has its own domain and audience, all under the NeverLost umbrella.

NeverLost · neverlost.studio

"Not all those who wander are lost"

A Tolkien-rooted studio name for a geographic premise — that wandering through a complex dataset, if you know how to read it, always leads somewhere worth knowing.

neverlost.studio →

In development

sundays.neverlost.studio

Sundays

NFL travel intelligence

Geographic analysis of every NFL team's road schedule. Week-by-week travel distance, trip difficulty scoring across four components (rest window, distance, altitude, weather exposure), cumulative season load profiles, and an interactive great-circle route map — including all 9 international games across 3 continents.

NFL · 32 teams · 272 games deck.gl · MapLibre SaaS · $9/mo
34,173 mimost-traveled team this season

In development

saturdays.neverlost.studio

Saturdays

CFB travel burden · recruiting geography

The Sundays methodology applied to college football, with a second spatial lens: recruiting. Where do programs pull talent from geographically? How does conference realignment reshape travel burden? Two stories told together across 130+ FBS programs.

CFB · FBS · 130+ programs Travel + recruiting SaaS
130+FBS programs across all Power Four conferences

In development

reportcard.neverlost.studio

Report Card

NAEP state achievement · mapped over time

The Nation's Report Card reimagined as a spatial product. State vs. state performance comparison across grades, subjects, and decades. The geographic patterns in achievement gaps that aggregate statistics hide. Built for educators, policy researchers, and journalists who know the data but haven't seen it this way.

NAEP data · 50 states Longitudinal · back to 1992 SaaS
30+ yearsof NAEP data · grades 4 & 8

Coming soon

energy.neverlost.studio

Energy

EIA data · infrastructure geography

The spatial story of American energy — infrastructure, generation mix, pricing patterns, and the transition from fossil fuels to renewables — told through geographic data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

EIA data Energy policy Planned
2027planned release

The methodology

Same toolkit, different domain

Every NeverLost product follows the same four steps. The datasets change; the spatial reasoning doesn't.

01

Find the dataset

Public data that's rich, underexplored spatially, and used by a real audience — NFL schedules, NAEP results, EIA infrastructure records.

02

Design the metric

A derived index that requires domain knowledge to build correctly. Trip difficulty score, achievement contour, recruiting range — not just a map of raw data.

03

Build the pipeline

ETL, PocketBase, deck.gl, MapLibre. A lightweight stack that loads once and filters in memory — fast, self-contained, deployable anywhere.

04

Publish the insight

Free tier for headline indices. Paid tier for full data, week-by-week breakdowns, and export. Gating at the database level, not just the UI.

Research

The academic foundation

Six peer-reviewed publications, 350+ citations. The through-line is applying spatial methods to problems others haven't framed geographically — which is also what NeverLost does.

Biogeomorphic Impacts of Invasive Species

Fei, Phillips, Shouse · 2014

Annual Review of Ecology,
Evolution & Systematics

Identification of Understory Invasive Exotic Plants with Remote Sensing in Urban Forests

Shouse, Liang, Fei · 2013

Int'l Journal of Applied
Earth Observation

Expert Systems Model for Kentucky Arrow Darter Habitat in the Upper Kentucky River Basin

Shouse, Blandford · 2015

Papers in Applied Geography

Intermodal Network Model of Coal Distribution in the United States

Blandford, Grossardt, Shouse, Ripy · 2015

Transportation Research Record

Expert Systems Archaeological Predictive Model

Ripy, Grossardt, Shouse et al. · 2014

Transportation Research Record

Soil Deepening by Trees and the Effects of Parent Material

Shouse, Phillips · 2016

Geomorphology

350+
Citations · Google Scholar Cited by researchers at Oxford, University of Tennessee, Washington State, Beijing Normal University, Stellenbosch University, and others — across ecology, geography, forestry, and transportation engineering.

About

Who's behind the work

Credentials

PhD · GeographyUniversity of Kentucky · Biogeography, spatial ecology, landscape dynamics
MS · ForestryUniversity of Kentucky
BS · Geography & GeoscienceUniversity of Louisville
Director, Geospatial Technology & GeoAIGeoConvergence
Founder · Shouse Solutions LLCNeverLost Studio
AWS · GIS · Remote Sensing · GeoAICloud-native geospatial, satellite imagery, spatial AI

I'm a geographer by training and a builder by inclination. My PhD research focused on the spatial dimensions of biological invasion, soil dynamics, and habitat modeling — but the real question underneath all of it was the same: how do you turn messy spatial data into something a decision-maker can actually use?

That question drove me from academia into industry, where I now lead geospatial technology and GeoAI at GeoConvergence. It also drives NeverLost — the studio I run through Shouse Solutions LLC, where the same methodology gets applied to NFL schedules, NAEP test scores, college football recruiting maps, and energy infrastructure.

The datasets change. The approach doesn't. Find the spatial signal, design a metric that requires real domain knowledge to build correctly, and put it in front of people who can use it.

I'm based in Louisville, KY. I also work on AI integration in K–12 education — helping school districts and edtech teams think clearly about what generative AI actually means for instruction and administration, and building tools when the existing ones don't fit.

Let's talk about your project

A 30-minute call is usually enough to figure out if there's a fit — whether that's a NeverLost app, AI integration for a school district, a geospatial problem, or something that doesn't fit neatly into any of those boxes.