Brian Thomas
Project Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBrian Thomas is a project scientist and data strategy leader with over 30 years of experience designing and managing enterprise scientific data environments across NASA and major astronomy institutions. He combines hands-on software engineering (Python, Java, Ruby, C/C++) with program-level leadership—shaping agency-wide data policy, building secure developer platforms, and directing cloud and ML-enabled research infrastructure like HelioCloud and the Heliophysics Data Portal. His work spans scientific archives, semantic technologies, and practical ML/NLP applications to extract and link scientific knowledge, including contributions to a popular NASA APOD API microservice. Known for leading distributed teams and complex, cross-agency collaborations, he regularly translates technical requirements into roadmaps, workshops, and funded projects. He holds a PhD, mentors data scientists, and has repeatedly bridged research, operations, and policy to accelerate open science and reproducible data practices.
11 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Ph.D. at Penn State UniversityUniversity of Georgia
English, Spanish
Github Skills (16)
api-rest10
rest-api10
api10
python10
apidoc10
api-design10
flask10
flask-ask10
restful-api10
astronomy9
beautifulsoup8
http-request8
google-app-engine7
json7
microservices-application7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
nasa/apod-api
Dec 2015 - Apr 2019
Astronomy Picture of the Day API service
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 55 commits, 1 PR in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Brian contributed significantly to the development of a microservice API for the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) service. Their work involved refactoring existing code, integrating and adapting an APOD API from another project. Key contributions include implementing endpoints, handling API requests, and fetching data from the NASA APOD site. Furthermore, the user focused on improving the service's functionality to integrate with a Google App Engine environment.
apiastrologyastronomy-picturepythonastronomy-picture-of-the-day
nasa/dictionaries
Aug 2015 - May 2018
A collection of NASA "dictionaries", including thesauri, taxonomies and ontologies.
Contributions:27 commits, 1 PR, 20 pushes in 2 years 9 months
taxonomiespythonnasaontologiesdictionaries
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