Biography

Sharon Kandris is the Executive Director of the Polis Center. She has more than 25 years of experience helping organizations use data and GIS to better understand their communities. She continues serving as Director of Community Informatics area as well.

Kandris has an established reputation in neighborhood information systems and community informatics. She has consulted with nearly 20 cities across the nation on how to build a sustainable community information system and served on the executive committee of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, a 29-city collaboration lead by the Urban Institute to further the development and use of neighborhood-level information systems in local policymaking and community building. Kandris has partnered on several Urban Institute cross-site studies and routinely helps community-based organizations, not-for-profits, neighborhoods, government, educators, and researchers use neighborhood data to better understand their communities and improve their decision making.

She has served on several community advisory committees, provided leadership on community-wide education initiatives, and provided strategic planning and support to nonprofits and local government. Sharon is a Class of 2014 Hoosier Fellow of the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence at Indiana University. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with a M.A. degree in Geography and Geographic Information Systems and Urban Planning. Her B.S. degree in Geography, Mathematics, and Statistics is from Northwest Missouri State University.