My professional work blends Earth observation (EO) 🛰️ and data science 💻. While I've been dabbling in scientific coding 👨💻 for a decade, starting with and
in 2015, and moving to JavaScript for cloud computing with Google Earth Engine 🌎 (GEE) in 2017, I have been working professionally with EO and geospatial 🗺️ data since mid-2004. Over the years, I have applied EO and geospatial science specifically in the areas of land cover change detection, ecosystem monitoring, disaster response, and integrated water resource management, and I have supported the NASA Earth Action Capacity Building Program for the better part of the previous twenty years. Most of the GitHub repos I am hosting ⬇️ are hence linked to that work. Across my career, I have worked with multispectral, thermal, hyperspectral, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and LiDAR data [airborne + spaceborne], and I was one of the editors of the 2019 SERVIR-SilvaCarbon SAR Handbook 📔.
I currently serve as a Principal Research Scientist 👨🔬 with the Lab for Applied Science 🔬 within the Earth System Science Center of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), and I am also an affiliate member of UAH's graduate faculty. I am a Google Developer Expert for Earth Engine. I am also an Early Adopter for NASA's PACE hyperspectral 🛰️ mission. My educational background 👨🎓 includes a double Ph.D. in forest ecology from AgroParisTech (France) and Technische Universität Dresden (Germany) [2016], a master's degree in forest resources from the University of Washington [2004], and an undergraduate degree in biology from Loyola University Maryland [2001]. If you're so inclined, you can check out the recording of my Dec. 2016 doctoral dissertation defense, which combined the mapping of forest types with Earth observation big data (i.e., geospatial machine learning, #GeoML). 😉