Jim Steenburgh from the University of Utah has been awarded the 2024 Russell L. DeSouza Award by the NSF Unidata Users committee. The DeSouza Award honors “substantive and sustained contributions of energy and expertise to the geosciences community that reflect the ideals of the NSF Unidata Program's mission” to better serve the geosciences.
Steenburgh's served as a member of the NSF Unidata User’s Committee from 1999 through 2006, and as a member of the Policy Committee (the former name of today’s Strategic Advisory Committee) from 2009 through 2012. After leaving the Policy Committee, he continued to help the Program move forward, serving on the Integrated Data Viewer’s technical steering committee from 2012 through 2015.
He has been a steadfast advocate for the idea that users of the Program’s data streams and software are what makes the NSF Unidata community work. He has maintained and shared an IDV bundle archive that other institutions could use and modify for their own needs and he uses NSF Unidata software and data in his own classes, thus promoting their use by students as they progress beyond his purview.
The DeSouza Award commendation text reads, in part:
You exemplify these ideals through your ongoing efforts to help students and educators make effective use of modern data management and visualization technologies, including Unidata’s THREDDS Data Server and Integrated Data Viewer. You have consistently promoted the sharing of data, software, and ideas, and have been a strong proponent of the idea that users of data and software are what make the NSF Unidata community work.
The 2024 DeSouza Award was presented to Steenburgh during the September 2024 Meeting of the Unidata's Users and Strategic Advisory Committees. As part of the award ceremony, Steenburgh gave a talk to the committee that highlighted his experiences with numerical weather prediction and the NSF Unidata program as he has seen them evolve over the course of his career. We encourage you to watch his talk, which is available on Unidata's YouTube channel and is linked from the Unidata Seminar Series page.
