Russell Manser joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 18, 2020. Russell recently defended his Master's thesis in Atmospheric Science at Texas Tech University and will be graduating toward the end of the summer. He'll be pursuing a PhD in Atmospheric Science at Texas Tech this fall.
The Unidata Summer Internships offer undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to work with Unidata software engineers and scientists on projects drawn from a wide variety of areas in the atmospheric and computational sciences. Because UCAR facilities are still closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Unidata's summer 2020 internships are taking place remotely, with interns and mentors meeting frequently via Slack and Google Hangouts.
“I've had an interest in the intersection of atmospheric science and software development for a few years now and Unidata is a great place for me to foster those interests,” says Russell. “I'm excited to contribute to community tools such as MetPy, which I use frequently myself. I look forward to absorbing as much as I can about programming and software design from the talented team here.”
Over the course of the summer, Russell will be working to integrate support for large datasets in MetPy via the xarray and dask libraries. “I frequently work with large amounts of output from numerical weather models, so improving the efficiency of calculations on large datasets is a problem that I am familiar with and very interested in working on,” he says.
Outside of academics, Russell enjoys going to concerts, playing bass guitar, and collecting and playing video games. “I was hoping to push myself to get outdoors more and take up hiking in Boulder this summer,” he says. “Obviously the circumstances do not permit that, but I am still grateful to be participating in the internship remotely.”
Please join us in welcoming Russell to the Program Center for the summer!
