James Mason
Senior Professional Staff at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Laurel, Maryland, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Mason is a science-driven engineer and engineer-minded scientist with 10+ years designing and flying small satellites and analyzing solar eruptive events to improve space weather forecasting. As Principal Investigator for NASA’s SunCET CubeSat at Johns Hopkins APL and a long-time contributor to the SunPy open-source community, he bridges instrument development, mission systems, and data science—often doing everything from thermal design to back-end code for EVE data handling. His research on coronal dimming and coronal mass ejections combines multi-satellite observations with MHD and magnetic modeling to predict CME kinetics and arrival times, with applications to exoplanet habitability. James’s background includes leading MinXSS CubeSat efforts, a NASA postdoc at Goddard, and mentoring roles at Frontier Development Lab and university programs, reflecting a rare mix of applied spacecraft engineering and solar-physics modeling.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Aerospace Engineering Sciences at University of Colorado at BoulderUniversity of California Santa Cruz
English, idl, matlab, python, objective c, php, hydra (in house scripting language)
Github Skills (8)
sun10
solar10
python10
documentation10
data-analysis9
time-series9
astropy9
testing8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
sunpy/sunpy
Jan 2018 - Feb 2020
SunPy - Python for Solar Physics
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 commits, 3 PRs, 58 comments in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the `sunpy` project by modifying existing code and adding new functionality related to handling and processing of EVE (Extreme ultraviolet Variability Experiment) data. They updated docstrings for improved clarity and provided examples of how to access different levels of EVE data using `sunpy.net.Fido`. The user also refactored code to adhere to PEP8 standards and added tests. Further, they added the creation of a subclass of `astropy.Time` for handling utime and updated an example to illustrate usage of the library.
physicspythonsolarsimulationpython-3
jmason86/Decide-For-Me
Jun 2017 - Mar 2020
Contributions:2 releases, 11 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 9 months
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