Despite her youth, Elizaveta Boriskina, who goes by Liza, has already lived many lives. In just a few years, she has been a graduate student, meteorologist, sales manager, and a deminer. Now, she is one of HALO’s brightest minds in Geographic Information System (GIS), thanks to support from Trimble Foundation under the ‘Women in GIS for Demining’ initiative.
After graduating with a master’s degree in geography and tourism from Kharkiv National University, Liza worked to apply her knowledge to support aviation. “I left my job as a meteorologist at the Kharkiv airport in 2022, literally ten days before the war started,” Liza remembers. “After that, I spent six months living with my grandmother under occupation, in a village in the Izyum district."
"When we were liberated, I came back to Kharkiv and took a job working with clients for an online shop – absolutely not my thing at all – and I wanted to get back to my field of expertise and help people.”
Fortunately, Liza had already heard about demining and HALO Ukraine from the pre-war days. “I knew about HALO from before the war because I grew up not far from the Donbas region. After I returned to Kharkiv, I applied originally for the role of GIS Specialist, but I did not make it past the initial selection round. Instead, I ended up starting at HALO in June 2023 as a deminer.”
Now, more than one year since she traded in her sales headset for a metal detector, Liza has found a path back to her area of specialty within HALO, thanks to the new opportunities on the Ukraine program funded by Trimble Foundation.
“Even though I loved my job as a deminer, when I found out that there were new opportunities in the GIS department, made possible by Trimble Foundation, I was excited to return to my field of specialty," said Liza.
Liza looks back fondly on her time as a deminer and finds that each experience strengthens the other. “I really liked working in the field in places like Chaklovske and Doslidne [minefields in Kharkiv oblast],” Liza reflects. “Some parts were difficult, but I loved my team. We developed a common language with each other. I really had a passion for searching out signals [with a metal detector]. I’m also really interested in medicine, so I enjoyed the paramedic training."
"My experience working as a deminer has made me a more valuable member of the GIS team."
“It’s easier for me to do my work with data and GIS thanks to my field experience – I understand the logic of how everything is supposed to be and notice immediately when something doesn’t make sense. I am always learning more and more and feel that I am constantly deepening and developing my knowledge and skills in GIS, never standing still.”
Liza is based at HALO’s Kharkiv office, the base of HALO’s operations for the eastern oblasts of Kharkiv, Sumy, and Donetsk. HALO’s area of operations covers some of the most dense and complex contamination, where “having access to more advanced GIS and remote sensing technologies is particularly important,” Liza explains. Having the best possible tools is also key to cope with the challenging operational environment in the east. “The constant air raids make it challenging to work with GIS technologies and with drones” because the air raids scramble the signal, and because civilian drone flights are prohibited during active air alerts. This means that HALO field staff have to make the most out of every moment when they are able to employ these technologies.
Liza and some of the maps she created to support Kharkiv operations.
Liza says she is motivated to do her job by seeing how integral GIS is for HALO’s operations. “The maps I produce are needed and used every day by our operational staff working in the field. In the GIS department, we all love what we do. I think it’s the same for everyone who works here – we are all willing to do whatever is needed to help Kharkiv oblast and Ukraine as a whole.”
“I would like to thank Trimble Foundation and Trimble Geospatial for supporting HALO, especially here in Ukraine. Their equipment makes our work clearing Ukraine of mines and other explosive ordnance much more efficient and effective. Personally, I am also grateful to Trimble for sponsoring positions for people with this very specific specialization like me. Thanks to Trimble Foundation, I am able to continue developing in my chosen field and advance in my career.”
On top of her impressive professional endeavors, Liza somehow finds the time to try out extreme sports like bungee jumping and to read science fiction. “It’s so hard to choose my favorite book,” Liza confessed, “but I have to go with one that I always come back to when I am feeling low: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.” In one of the stories that make up this novel, a character named Spender offers a thought that applies to Liza’s work, using science to protect priceless human life: “Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain.”
