John Leeman joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on January 30th, 2017. John obtained bachelor's degrees in meteorology and geophysics from the University of Oklahoma in 2012, and a PhD in geoscience from Penn State in 2017. He has worked in research fields ranging from gas hydrate thermodynamics to SODAR and boundary layer instrumentation, and did his doctoral work in earthquake physics. John's software development experience includes work on the seafloor process simulator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and telemetry analysis tools for NASA's Morpheus lunar lander project. The common thread amongst all of these projects was “the development of new tools and software to attack previously intractable problems.”
As a researcher himself, John brings first-hand knowledge of how scientists want to interact with their research tools to Unidata. He joined the Unidata Program Center because, he says, “making well tested and reliable tools with which to conduct reproducible science is probably the largest challenge and most needed area of innovation in research today.”
At Unidata, John will initially be lending his talents to a range of Python-centric projects. “I'm looking forward to working on continuing to expand the capabilities of MetPy and creating tools to make data processing and visualization easier and more intuitive,” he says.
Please help us welcome John to the Unidata Program Center Team!
