Devin Cowan - PHD Student at University of British Columbia

Devin Cowan

PHD Student at University of British Columbia - Geophysical Inversion Facility

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Summary

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Senior

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Top School

Devin Cowan is a PhD student and research scientist at UBC’s Geophysical Inversion Facility with a decade of hands-on experience developing open-source and proprietary software for computational geophysics. He specializes in electromagnetic forward modeling and inversion—particularly time-domain EM, airborne natural-source systems, and induced polarization—translating field-collected data into robust, practitioner-ready workflows. Devin is a core contributor to SimPEG, adding TDEM modules and survey/receiver implementations, and he also builds GUI tooling (GIFtools) that bridges legacy Fortran codes with modern user workflows. His work uniquely emphasizes knowledge transfer and real-world datasets over synthetic cases, ensuring methods are usable by field practitioners. Comfortable at the intersection of numerical methods and machine learning, he focuses on practical parameter estimation and reproducible, well-documented software.

10 years of coding experience

8 years of employment as a software developer

Bachelor of Science (B.Sc. with Coop), Physics and Earth Sciences, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc. with Coop), Physics and Earth Sciences at University of Victoria

Master of Science (M.Sc.), Geophysics, Master of Science (M.Sc.), Geophysics at The University of British Columbia

Github Skills (4)

scientific-computing10

el10

python10

geophysics9

Programming languages (4)

TeXHTMLJupyter NotebookPython

Github contributions (5)

simpeg/simpeg

Sep 2017 - Jan 2023

Simulation and Parameter Estimation in Geophysics - A python package for simulation and gradient based parameter estimation in the context of geophysical applications.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:121 reviews, 551 commits, 44 PRs in 5 years 5 months

Contributions summary:Devin appears to be working on implementing new modules, receivers, and related classes for time-domain electromagnetics (TDEM) simulations, which involves defining and computing various physical quantities. They are modifying classes related to the survey, defining the waveforms for the transmitters, and extending the existing base classes to account for the specific geometry and measured data. The user also seems to be implementing features for handling data related to both models.

inversionpythonfinite-volumesimulationparameter-estimation

ubcgif/GIFtoolsCookbook

Nov 2017 - Jan 2023

Cookbook for GIFtools highlighting the things you can do from menus

Contributions:274 commits, 44 PRs, 216 pushes in 5 years 2 months

cookbookhighlighting

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