Meet The Team
We are a team of highly skilled individuals capable of developing and applying high-performance computing solutions, integrating and deploying advanced software techniques to improve NASA’s Earth Science models, providing advanced software support and training, and conducting research in emerging computing technologies and data analytics.
Dr. Craig Pelissier joined NASA in 2013 as a member of ASTG after completing receiving PhD in numerical simulations of Quantum field theories from The George Washington University. In 2018, he became the lead of ASTG and manages its diverse...
Dr. Jules Kouatchou has been working on implementing atmospheric models on high performance computers. He is involved in maintaining the GEOS CTM model and improving the computing capabilities (adding ESMF regridding and Parallel IO) of the...
Dr. Carlos Cruz is a computational scientist at SSAI and NASA GSFC. For over 20 years he has been involved in all aspects of software development while supporting several earth system models including GEOS, GISS modelE and NU-WRF. He is...
Dr. Christopher Kung is a Software System’s Engineer that has over 15 years of experience in the realm of high performance computing at the DoD and NASA. At the DoD, he worked with researchers and scientists to port and optimize...
Deepthi Raghunandan is a member of ASTG. She completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Maryland. Her thesis pertains to characterizing data analysis for the sake of improving data science education and collaboration. At ASTG,...
Dr. Purnendu Chakraborty is an HPC applications developer with a particular interest in new technologies. He is currently working on enabling GEOS simulations on exascale architectures.
Email: Purnendu.chakraborty@nasa.gov
Florian Deconinck is a computer scientist at SSAI and NASA GSFC, working on HPC and GPU optimization for climate models. Before entering the numerical modelling optimization field, he worked for 8 years in the visual effects industry,...
Vanessa Valenti is a recent member of the ASTG with a Bachelor’s degree in Geography/Environmental Studies. She is currently developing web-based UIs that leverage the Python ecosystem (e.g., Holoviews, Bokeh, and Panels) that provide fast,...
Dr. Maharaj Bhat is a programmer analyst at SSAI and NASA GSFC with over 30 years of experience supporting high performance computing applications.
Education: Ph.D, Aerospace Engineering, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Email:...
Bruce van Aartsen has over 25 years of experience in weather applications development, including model visualization for the Air Force Meteorological Models office. At ASTG, he co-authored software coding standards, developed and maintained...
Brandon Smith is a computer scientist at SSAI and NASA GSFC, and holds a Master’s in Computer Science specializing in Machine Learning. He is currently working to provide accurate, global, sensor-independent water quality products across...
Dr. Dan’l Pierce is a Senior Systems Software Engineer for GST at NASA GSFC. His focus is on the development, deployment, and tuning of computational methods. This entails both novel method development together with innovative algorithms...
Mahmoud Saeedimoghaddam is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in Geospatial Information Science from the University of Cincinnati. His research interest is in GeoAI and Computational Earth Science....
