Projects

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Artemis III Landing Site SfS Terrain Modeling

Fine-tuning Segement Anything (SAM)

Lunar Foundational Model First-Look Science Team

VIPER Rover VIS Instrument Scientist

JPL Planetary Science School 2020
JPL Press Article New Yorker Article LPSC 2021 Abstract AAS PSJ Paper

Other open source work

A Pythonic Wrapper for the SPICE Toolkit
PDF Code Slides Video

Frontier Development Lab AI Researcher: Flood prediction
PDF Video

Numba implementation of 2012 Hapke Photometric Model

HSP mapping products advising

UNet to map Mars
PDF Slides

Ph.D. Dissertation at JHU

NASA GSFC Summer 2013 Internship
PDF

Undergraduate Research (2011-2014)

Recent Posts

As many open source developers recently found, Travis CI has stopped providing their service to the open-source community for free. …

5 min read

Today I have open-sourced ASAP-Stereo , which I developed to automate the Ames Stereo Pipeline and to make Digital Elevation Models …

3 min read

One of my favorite plugins for Google Chrome was the Planet View extension from Planet (formerly known as Planet Labs). This plugin …

2 min read

1 min read

Using SpiceyPy to map the Curiosity rover (MSL).

note:

Here is a link to a gist jupter notebook of this tutorial

In this post, I …

9 min read
See all posts

Publications

Crater counting is a widely applied methodology for dating large areas of planetary surfaces, but is difficult to apply the method to …
PDF DOI

We reassessed several orbital topographic data sets for the Perseverance rover landing site at Jezero Crater, Mars to better understand …
PDF DOI

The first samples collected by the Perseverance rover on the Mars 2020 mission were from the Maaz formation, a lava plain that covers …
PDF DOI

Abstract Layered rocks in the Arabia Terra region of Mars preserve a record of the planet’s ancient climate. However, the exact …
PDF DOI

During the first year of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, Perseverance rover has investigated the dark crater floor unit of Jezero crater and …
PDF DOI
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Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Senior Software Engineer

Planet

Nov 2024 – Present Remote
Senior Software Engineer on the Automated Mosaics team.
 
 
 
 
 

Senior Science Systems Engineer

SETI Institute/NASA Ames Research Center

Jan 2024 – Oct 2026 Remote
NASA VIPER VIS Instrument Scientist Adapted NASA JPL VICAR software for Stereo and Panorama processing to support VIPER VIS camera system. Developed OpenCV to JPL CAHVORE camera model conversion Python software. Development of photogrammetry pipeline using Ames Stereo Pipeline for VIPER VIS camera system. Reviewed reference Python implementation of Lunar Grid Reference System as part of the Artemis Geospatial Team. Principal Investigator for NASA ROSES PDART23 #37 'Improving SpiceyPy: the Python SPICE interface.'
 
 
 
 
 

Postdoctoral Research Associate

California Institute of Technology

Feb 2022 – Jan 2024 Pasadena California
Mars 2020 Rover Science Team Collaborator, Mastcam-Z Postdoctoral Collaborator. Tactical Science Operations Payload Uplink Lead for geology and multispectral targeting of Mastcam-Z during rover planning. Directed and communicated observation requirements, science intent, and pointing designs to science and engineering leads. Participated in science discussion and campaign implementation meetings and Sedimentology and Stratigraphy working groups. Contributed to open-source software for OGC Tiles and dynamic raster tile servers to improve accessibility of planetary science data. Developed application of Segment Anything Model (SAM) to Mastcam-Z & NavCam images to support daily tactical science planning. Consulted for Python programming and open-source best practices for grant proposals and interviews of undergraduate research intern candidates.
 
 
 
 
 

Attitude Control Student

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

May 2020 – Jul 2020 Remote
Attitude Control Student for JPL Planetary Science Summer School. See PSSS Project page above for more information.
 
 
 
 
 

Researcher

NASA Frontier Development Lab

Jun 2019 – Aug 2019 Mountain View California
Disaster Prevention, Progress and Response (Floods), AI and domain science. Summer internship.
 
 
 
 
 

Ph.D.

Johns Hopkins University

Sep 2016 – Jan 2022 Baltimore Maryland
Planetary Science Ph.D. candidate studying sedimentary deposits on Mars using high resolution remote sensing and topography data. Using stereo imaging and machine learning lead investigation into climate history of Mars through correlation of regional stratigraphy of Arabia Terra.
Developed a novel crater statistics method to constrain depositional hiatus lengths from partially exhumed craters. Created end-to-end scalable and reproducible scientific pipeline with Pangeo stack (Dask & Xarray). Applied innovative statistical geologic modeling to visualize 3D structural geology of deposits utilizing HPC resources. Built reproducible HiRISE stereo photogrammetry pipeline that also support other lab members, saving days of time required for manual approach. Pioneered application of Deep Learning (U-Net CNN) to automate time-intensive geologic mapping of layered deposits on Mars.
 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineer

CCRi

Jun 2014 – Aug 2016 Virginia
Designed new features for GeoMesa (FOSS Geodatabase) including geospatial BlobStore. Implemented new geospatial analytics and OGC web service integrations between GeoMesa and Geoserver backend. Worked with customers onsite with deployment and integration of GeoMesa and web-map visualization tools.
 
 
 
 
 

NASA Summer Intern

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Jun 2013 – Aug 2013 Maryland
Produced coverage reports and Maps of Titan by the Cassini CIRS instrument for end of mission science planning.
 
 
 
 
 

Undergraduate

The University of Virginia

Aug 2010 – May 2014 Charlottesville Virginia
Environmental Sciences B.Sc.

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