Our data team – with more than a combined 85 years in the industry – are the best in the business, with a wide variety of previous experiences that mold the work they do here at AGS. What are their specialties, and what are they working on over the summer? Meet the team!
Gary Menger-President
Our founder and president, Gary, has been creating data for 40 years, founding AGS in 1996. Gary is spending his summer on Snapshot engine performance tuning and extensions, extending the synthetics model into population, reworking our health care data using the new synthetic population model and working on a second generation non-resident population model.
Matt Needham-Senior Vice President and Chief Demographer
Matt Needham, long the driving force behind our demographic estimates and projections, has been at AGS for 15 years after nearly 12 years at Scan US. With 2025A in the rear view, Matt will be spending his summer preparing for the fall release of 2025B, expanding the content of our estimates and projections with additional variables and enhancements from our parcel and land use project, and generally mucking about in the affairs of the data team (internally referred to as the geek squad by those of us on the sales/marketing/customer relations team).
Thomas Cannon-Senior Data Scientist
Our resident Astrophysicist Thomas has worked professionally in the data science world since 2016. At AGS, Thomas focuses on general demographic work with an emphasis on helping to enhance our data with the use of AI and new technologies. In that vein, Thomas is working on our National parcel and land use datasets, combining them into a quarterly block-level file that contains metrics on current property development. He is excited to take this a step further to create a block-level file that identifies areas of the country that are in active development, creating a heat map of sorts for development.
Ben Needham-System Analyst
Fresh off his college graduation in 2020 from Lewis & Clark College with a dual degree in Computer Science and English, Ben joined the AGS data team and has become an integral part of building our API, Snapshot, as well as becoming our resident cartography guy. He is always working on Snapshot maintenance and enhancements but is spending his summer working on a special project, the “AGS Manhattan Project”. The goal is to create a proprietary AGS census block file which splits existing blocks as boundaries change and as development occurs within a decade. We will be able to provide better estimates for radius/polygon areas where growth or boundary changes are occurring. It will also give us better base level “containers” for doing our annual estimates, and especially for projections. The output will be a set of “census blocks” where we append a sixteenth digit – likely a letter not a number. We will use our parcel level land use, building footprints, and parcel geometry to decide what blocks should be split and how.
Alex Burdsall-Spatial Data Scientist
The newest member of the data team, Alex joined the AGS team in January 2025. Previously, Alex worked at Trademark Property Company, where he used AGS data, eventually leading the Research team. There, he developed and managed business intelligence platforms, building a strong foundation in data analytics, automation, visualization, and storytelling. His expertise includes crafting data pipelines, developing custom research models, and bridging the gap between technical data insights and non-technical stakeholders. Over the summer, Alex is working on undoing the Mexico census suppression, modeling variables, and creating our own set of rural block groups in Mexico to finalize the first vintage of our upcoming Mexico data release.
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