Forrest Williams
Senior Radar Systems Engineer at Ursa Space Systems
Ankeny, Iowa, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolForrest Williams is a Senior Radar Systems Engineer with eight years of experience applying SAR, InSAR, and machine learning to monitor natural hazards and scale geospatial workflows. He blends hands-on algorithm development and cloud-native engineering—led RTC and Sentinel-1 burst access projects at the Alaska Satellite Facility and now builds SAR signal processing and MTI workflows at Ursa Space Systems. An active open-source contributor and key data engineer on MintPy, he specializes in ingesting and converting diverse SAR products (including ASF HyP3 and FRInGE) and enabling GDAL interoperability for time-series analysis. Forrest’s background spans academic PhD research in SAR remote sensing, NASA JPL collaborations, and operational data science for environmental and agricultural applications, giving him rare end-to-end expertise from field validation to production pipelines. He’s known for making complex SAR data more accessible at scale and for turning research-grade methods into reliable tools used by the wider remote sensing community.
8 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Environmental Science, Master of Science - MS Environmental Science at Iowa State UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Geology and SAR Remote Sensing, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Geology and SAR Remote Sensing at Massey University - Te Kunenga ki PūrehuroaBachelor of Arts - BA Geological and Earth Sciences/Geosciences, Bachelor of Arts - BA Geological and Earth Sciences/Geosciences at Carleton College
Github Skills (19)
raid10
data-pipelines10
python10
insar10
gdal10
geodesy10
geophysics10
data-pipeline10
rad10
data-engineering9
hdf9
numpy9
filtering8
filter8
geoscience7
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
insarlab/MintPy
Apr 2020 - Nov 2021
Miami InSAR time-series software in Python
Role in this project:
Data Engineer
Data EngineerContributions:12 reviews, 14 commits, 20 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Forrest primarily contributes to the development and maintenance of data processing pipelines for the MintPy software. Their work focuses on ingesting and preparing data from various sources, including FRInGE and ASF HyP3, and converting them into formats compatible with MintPy's processing framework. They implement tools for working with GDAL, enabling the export and integration of MintPy data with other geospatial tools. Additionally, they have made contributions to data filtering and processing, including the implementation of double-difference filtering.
sentinel-1tectonicspythontime-series-analysismiami
forrestfwilliams/index_safe
Jan 2023 - Feb 2024
A package for finding the byte index of files in a SAFE archive
Contributions:4 releases, 1 review, 87 PRs in 1 year
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