Cheryl Knott is the Assistant Director for the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance-Jacob France Institute. Since 2007, Cheryl has worked to ensure the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of community indicators that describe the quality of life for Baltimore City communities. She coordinates with staff and external data-creating agencies to produce customized statistical and research reports and evaluations that examine neighborhood-level trends on socio-economic characteristics, crime and safety, public health, housing, educational achievement, and sustainability.

Cheryl is involved in coordinating Baltimore Data Day, an annual event that brings together a diverse audience to talk about data and resources in the city. She is a proponent of data democratization and has a strong interest in making data open and usable to the public as well as other professionals. Consequently, she has created several open data portals to disseminate BNIA-JFI data, reports, and visualizations, and has coordinated with the City of Baltimore to disseminate spatial data on the Open Baltimore portal.

Additional recent projects and initiatives include creating award-nominated data visualizations describing the intersections of housing affordability, housing voucher utilization, and demographics, describing longitudinal and spatial data trends for the Baltimore Community Change 2010-2020 Project, conducting spatial equity analyses of Capital Improvement Program (CIP) allocations for Baltimore City, and providing data services for the Choice Implementation Grant for Perkins Homes.

Prior to her arrival at BNIA-JFI, Cheryl studied at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Geography and Environmental Systems and a certification in Cartography in 2007 and a Master’s degree in Applied Sociology in 2013. She received a graduate certificate in Organizational Leadership from the University of Baltimore in 2022. Her research interests include the relationship between crime and the built environment, including developing new quantitative measures for studying urban crime risk at the block level. Cheryl has worked in several roles at BNIA-JFI, serving as a GIS/Data Assistant, GIS Analyst, GIS Project Manager, Research Manager, and also as Interim Director of BNIA-JFI from November 2022 – April 2023.

In 2017, Cheryl was awarded the University of Baltimore Staff Award for Extraordinary Public Service to the University and Greater Community for her work on communicating data and information. She recently served two terms as the Data and Resources Subcommittee Chair for the Maryland State Geographic Information Committee (MSGIC) and is currently appointed to the Maryland Council on Open Data. In her spare time, Cheryl is an Instructor in the Geography and Environmental Systems department at UMBC where she teaches classes on GIS, cartography, and data. She serves as co-editor for HUD Cityscape's Spatial Analysis and Methods (SpAM) department and is co-organizer for Maptime Bmore.