Susan M. Cunningham

Susan Cunningham serves as President of Spatial Data Research. A founding member of the company, she participates in nearly every facet of operations including business development, software planning and in E9-1-1 consulting and technical production. Prior to leading SDR as President, Susan worked as project manager and 9-1-1 consultant on more than 100 municipal, county and state E9-1-1 projects and served as SDR’s E9-1-1/GIS consultant to the State of New Mexico.

Susan holds a BA, a BJ and an MA from the University of Missouri, Columbia. She is a member of NENA and APCO and is a frequent attendee and presenter at E9-1-1, Addressing and GIS seminars and trainings. Susan helps promote SDR’s philosophy of assuring our clients’ continued success by involving them in our projects and educating them on the tools and processes we use to build the data and implement solutions. She has also designed many of SDR’s training tools and helped design and implement SDR’s web training program which offers on demand and scheduled webinar trainings to clients and interested parties.

At the core of SDR’s philosophy is the belief that we aren’t successful unless the clients we serve are successful. To that end, Susan, as president of SDR, along with Penny Knight and our senior technical team, strive to always make SDR and its resources accessible to our clients. We stay current with industry developments and the products offered by our competitors and partners so that we can help our clients use their data as effectively as possible and help point them in the right direction when problems occur that affect mapping. Susan, in particular, strives to educate our clients in the location accuracy of Phase II wireless 9-1-1 and in triaging issues with specific towers or processes.

Penny Knight, Vice President/Co-Owner of Spatial Data Research, Inc., joined SDR as Director of Sales & Marketing in 2022. Penny began her career with SDR in 2018 as HR Director and worked closely with our sales and marketing efforts, serving as co-Commercial Partner’s Representative for the Missouri MSPCC conference. Her efforts helped grow the conference, encourage both vendor and 911 community participation and establish a better working relationship between the 911 community and the commercial partners serving them.

Since taking on her leadership role at SDR, Penny has worked consistently to continue to grow her industry knowledge and technical skills. She has traveled hundreds of miles across Missouri and Oklahoma to visit SDR’s clients and learn more about all aspects of their operations and participating in SDR software installations and upgrades. In March of 2022, she was appointed Commercial Liaison on the MOAPCO Board and joined forces with DataMark to sponsor APCO’s Summer Summit in Sikeston Missouri. She also serves as Commercial Advisor on the MPSCC board.

Penny now leads SDR’s Sales and Marketing efforts nationally, with a focus on educating Public Safety agencies on how GIS solutions will improve their data for location and routing in a NG9-1-1 world. She is leading efforts to develop partnering relationships to better serve SDR’s clients and to continue SDR’s mission of providing professional products and service for the 911 GIS industry and standing behind them with people our clients trust.