Christopher Tessum
Assistant Professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Tessum is an environmental engineer and assistant professor at the University of Illinois with 14 years of research experience quantifying and reducing air quality-related public health impacts through life cycle assessment and scientific model development. His work bridges rigorous academic research—from a PhD on transportation-related air quality and climate impacts—to applied model building and policy-relevant assessments conducted at institutions including the University of Washington and Minnesota. He brings practical coding and data-visualization chops to his research, contributing substantive fixes and features to the popular gonum/plot library (e.g., rotated text, horizontal bars, legend alignment), which helps translate complex model outputs into clear figures. Christopher’s background in mechanical engineering, energy auditing, and LabVIEW instrumentation gives him a rare blend of experimental, computational, and policy-oriented perspectives that inform interdisciplinary solutions to air pollution and climate challenges.
14 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering at University of MinnesotaUniversity of Minnesota Twin Cities
English, Spanish
Github Skills (7)
data-visualizations10
data-visualization10
data-visualisation10
go10
plot10
testing10
computer-engineering9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
gonum/plot
Mar 2015 - May 2019
A repository for plotting and visualizing data
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:36 commits, 75 PRs, 180 pushes in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Christopher primarily focused on improving the `gonum/plot` repository by addressing bugs and implementing new features related to plotting and data visualization. They fixed a cropping bug and added a test, updated font sizes in the vgimg package, and fixed a legend alignment issue. Furthermore, they added functionalities for horizontal bar charts, implemented a method for canvas tiles, and introduced the capability for rotated text in text styles, indicating work across the plotting library's core functions and display elements.
data-analysispythondata-sciencevisualizingdata-visualization
ctessum/uiuc_website
Jul 2020 - Mar 2025
Tessum Research Group website
Contributions:1 review, 3 PRs, 34 pushes in 4 years 7 months
group-websiteresearch-group
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