Research
I work in the GT Oceanography Lab using NASA satellite data to study how giant swirling currents in the Gulf Stream (known as eddies) shape the microscopic plant life at the base of the ocean food chain. Two NASA missions drive the project: SWOT, which maps subtle bumps and dips in the sea surface, and PACE, a hyperspectral imager that picks up the color signature of different phytoplankton communities. Together they let us connect what's happening in the physics of the ocean with what's happening in its biology.
The work I actually do for the lab is engineering. I designed and built the lab's satellite data pipeline from scratch: a configurable, resumable Python system that ingests multi-terabyte datasets from four NASA APIs in parallel, runs eddy detection and tracking, joins the matching pigment data to each detected eddy, and outputs analysis-ready files the rest of the lab can do science on. Every experiment is driven by a single YAML config, individual stages checkpoint and resume after failures, and the whole pipeline runs distributed on Georgia Tech's PACE HPC cluster via Slurm with job-dependency chaining.