Rio McMahon

Rio McMahon joined the Unidata Program Center on May 17th, 2021 as a Machine Learning Specialist. This is a new area of focus for the Unidata Program, and Rio will be helping to identify ways in which machine learning can be leveraged to support geoscience research.

A Nevada native, Rio earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Nevada, Reno before becoming a structural engineer. He plied his trade as a registered Professional Engineer in California before moving to Boulder to pursue a Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Colorado. His thesis work involving multi-agent reinforcement learning led to his receiving his MS in May of 2021.

Nicole Corbin

Nicole Corbin joined the Unidata Program Center on February 1st, 2021 as an Educational Designer. Prior to joining Unidata, Nicole created learning content and educational experiences for technical support staff at Esri focusing on desktop GIS, Microsoft Windows administration, Python, and customer service. Nicole is passionate about instructional design and is always keeping up on the latest in learning sciences. Her professional interests include adult learning theories, inquiry-based learning, and modular/micro-learning.

Although she's been working in the GIS sector for the past five years, Nicole's background is in meteorology. She received both her Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Meteorology from North Carolina State University. It was there that she first became interested in discipline-based education research and pedagogy, and was able to experiment with creating educational content for university students. Her very first educational module covered hail growth processes. Now, at Unidata, she is excited to continue creating learning and outreach content for the greater Earth systems science community.

Hailey Johnson

Hailey Johnson joined the Unidata software development team on August 17th, 2020. Hailey majored in Computer Science and Earth and Ocean Science at Duke University, and briefly worked as a DevOps Engineer at Microsoft before enrolling in the Geological Sciences graduate program at the University of Florida. She will receive her Ph.D. in December, 2020.

Hailey’s doctoral work focused on coastal morphology and nearshore oceanography, with minor focuses in both Computer Engineering and Educational Technology. She is excited to join Unidata because its mission fits so well with her passion for leveraging software to support the earth science community in both research and outreach.

Tiffany Meyer joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on May 18th, 2020. Before joining Unidata, Tiffany had been at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) — a collaborative research facility sponsored by the University of Oklahoma — for the past 8 years. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma, and a Master of Science degree in Atmospheric Science with a focus on lightning from Colorado State University.

Drew Camron

Drew Camron joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on February 18th, 2020. Drew majored in Meteorology and Physics with a minor in Mathematics at Mississippi State University before coming to the University of Colorado for graduate studies in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science. He received his Master's degree in 2019.

Drew's graduate work included modeling atmospheric gravity waves before shifting to study modeled and observed satellite measurements of climate-scale precipitation patterns over the Greenland Ice Sheet. But his scientific work showed him a parallel path. “My time in school taught me that my motivation and excitement came from developing tools (especially software) that can help teach or enable other people to do exciting science,” he says.