“When people see ‘space’ in my title, they think NASA,” says Kyle Smith, associate director of space analytics for UCSF Real Estate. “It’s not a normal job where people know what it is.” He talked with us about his job leading a small, but mighty, team of three to keep track of space at UCSF and how lessons learned from his two decades in the Navy helped him on the job today.
Tell us about space analytics at UCSF
I tell people to imagine a college campus. You've got hundreds of buildings and within those buildings, there are thousands of rooms. Within those thousands of rooms, different people are doing all kinds of activities. Departments and people are assigned to those rooms, each space has a specific function and physical attributes. By collecting this data, we can drill down to track and learn certain things about that space, such as how many seats there are on a floor, or how many square feet are used to do research for a specific type of science. At UCSF, we have about 39,000 rooms. Somebody has to keep track of it all, and that's what we do.
Your “fun fact” when you started in January 2021 was having spent 111 consecutive days at sea in the Navy. What lessons from your service do you bring into your work today?
I started out in the Navy working on electronic systems, doing sonar acoustic analysis – far from space analytics at a leading medical research university. In my job, I need to solve a diverse number of problems, much like it was in the Navy; especially when deployed 10,000 miles from home. We had to be resourceful and able to solve complex problems, just as is required for this position with UCSF. There was also a strong sense of everybody working toward a common goal and being quite literally in the same boat. You build camaraderie. That’s one of the components that I missed most when I left that world. UCSF is the first place I've worked since where I feel that same sense of purpose and collaborative spirit. Everyone here understands the mission and I think that's why we're so collaborative, connected, and innovative.
What’s the most interesting part of your job?
A unique part of this job is interfacing with every component of the University. Space is so far-reaching – it touches all corners of UCSF. I have my home department, but I'm also working with a much larger community of people in every department that use our services and help us maintain current space data. I get to learn so much about what we do as an organization and about the entire physical landscape of our built environment. When you track nearly 9 million square feet of space occupied by hundreds of departments, you really get to know the people in those departments and learn about the work they're doing.
