Daniel Da Silva - Research Engineer - NASA Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute at University of Maryland Baltimore County

Daniel Da Silva

Research Engineer - NASA Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute at University of Maryland Baltimore County

Washington DC-Baltimore Area United States

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Summary

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Senior

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Top School

Daniel Da Silva is a research engineer and AI/ML practitioner with 12 years of experience applying advanced machine learning and software engineering to NASA-scale space science problems. Currently leading projects at the NASA Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute, he architects data discovery platforms, space weather forecasting systems, and fine-tunes foundation models for heliophysics, blending FAIR open-science practices with production-grade engineering. His background spans Silicon Valley at Google, startups, and flight-instrument engineering, and he pairs a PhD in Aerospace Engineering with hands-on CUDA-accelerated simulations and deep learning (diffusion models, PINNs, Fourier Neural Operators). An active open-source contributor, he fixed core NumPy array and dtype edge cases and added robust tests, demonstrating a focus on reliability in scientific tooling. Notably, he has published first-author work in venues like NeurIPS workshops and Space Weather and led a team to deploy a public NASA heliophysics data portal.

12 years of coding experience

8 years of employment as a software developer

Johns Hopkins University

Bachelor's degree, Mathematics, Bachelor's degree, Mathematics at University of Maryland

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Aerospace Engineering Sciences at University of Colorado Boulder

Github Skills (14)

array-comparison10

array-iterator10

debug10

set-operations10

operation10

python10

array-merge10

numpy10

test-automation10

testing10

data-structure9

data-structures9

c178

c118

Programming languages (12)

C++CSCSSJavaScriptCommon LispHTMLPerlJupyter Notebook

Github contributions (5)

numpy/numpy

Feb 2014 - Nov 2022

The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer

Contributions:1 review, 15 commits, 4 PRs in 8 years 10 months

Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on bug fixes and improvements related to array operations and data type handling within the NumPy library. They addressed issues such as infinite recursion in string formatting, deepcopying of zero-dimensional arrays, and incorrect behavior with user-defined data types. Additionally, the user contributed to test cases, ensuring the quality and reliability of the library by adding tests for the corrected functionalities and fixing build issues in directories with whitespace. The user's work involved modifying core files related to multi-array operations, testing, and data type definitions.

lapackpythonmpindarrayconvolution

CCSDSPy/ccsdspy

May 2017 - Jan 2023

I/O interface and utilities for CCSDS binary spacecraft data in Python. Library used in flight missions at NASA, NOAA, and SWRI

Contributions:33 reviews, 109 commits, 69 PRs in 5 years 9 months

flightpython-librarypythonmissionsnoaa

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