Instructor · Environmental Hazards Modeler · Geospatial Data Scientist
CIRES Earth and ESIIL Labs · University of Colorado Boulder

I am a hydrogeologist and environmental hazards modeler working at CIRES Earth and ESIIL Labs at the University of Colorado Boulder. As part of the Education Team, I am one of the instructors for our Graduate Earth Data Science Certificate program, ESIIL Stars, and the Data Short Course. I also participate in the many Hackathons we offer throughout the year. My work focuses on predictive modeling, hydrogeologic analysis, and geospatial data science. I build reproducible computational pipelines that translate environmental complexity into actionable models.

Current CIRES-funded research includes Shadow Ecology - a deep learning method I'm developing to investigate whether model residuals can be leveraged to improve predictions in data- and sensor-poor regions.

I am also the co-owner and primary data scientist of Daear Consulting, LLC, currently partnering with Oglala Lakota College on a USDA-NIFA funded grant to build hydrologic and agricultural data cubes for analysis, teaching, and Tribal data sovereignty workflows.

As a Tribal college graduate and former Tribal college faculty member at Oglala Lakota College, I am committed to sovereignty-aligned workflows and reproducible science that centers Tribal partners in environmental research.

• Hydrogeologic and Earth systems modeling
• Fire–vegetation predictive modeling
• Multispectral remote sensing integration
• Geospatial structure in model residuals
• Geospatial data engineering & data cubes
• Environmental hazard risk modeling
• Reproducible computational workflows
• Tribal Data Science
• Tribal Data Sovereignty

I created a series exploring common gaming algorithms and systems design concepts here: Systems at Play

Languages & Environments
Python R C Bash Jupyter VSCode Fortran

Geospatial
GDAL/OGR rasterio geopandas shapely fiona earthpy ArcGIS QGIS

Data & Compute
xarray zarr Dask pandas numpy

Cloud & Data Access
CyVerse STAC VSI/VSICURL earthaccess Planetary Computer Docker HPC/SLURM

Modeling & Analysis
scikit-learn scipy statsmodels

Visualization
matplotlib hvplot folium seaborn

Remote Sensing & Data Sources
Landsat Sentinel-2 MODIS NLCD EMIT Hyperspectral SSURGO NHD NWIS NOAA 3DEP/lidar

Version Control
Git GitHub

PhD, Geology and Geological Engineering · 2021
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology

BS, Interdisciplinary Earth and Environmental Sciences · 2013
Oglala Lakota College

If you're looking for my "old" GitHub, find it here Yawapi