Mcdonald Richard
Principal Scientist at Connected-waters LLC
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMcdonald Richard is a Principal Scientist and hydrologist based in Boulder, Colorado, combining three decades of river science with nine years of focused software engineering practice. He led interdisciplinary riverine studies at USGS, applying Lagrangian particle tracking, 2D/3D hydrodynamic and sediment-transport models to support large restoration and species recovery efforts across the US. A hands-on programmer in Python, Fortran, and C++, he co-developed and maintained open-source tools (iRIC/MD_SWMS, fluvial-particle, gdptools) and championed reproducible modeling through CI, containers, and versioned releases. His work contributed to national-scale modeling efforts like the National Hydrologic Model Infrastructure and PRMS deployments across diverse domains. Now leading scientific software at Connected-waters LLC, he blends field-driven geomorphology insight with software engineering to make complex hydrologic analyses transparent and repeatable. Colleagues rely on his rare combination of deep domain expertise, long-term program experience, and active stewardship of community open-source projects.
9 years of coding experience
University of California Santa Cruz
Github Skills (66)
conda10
conda-forge9
bmi9
earth-science9
docker-image9
traits9
modeling9
beancount8
water8
act8
vcenter8
surface8
zone8
hydrology7
soil7
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
nhm-usgs/bmi-prms-demo
Jun 2020 - Jun 2022
Repository contains notebooks to demo PRMS BMIs
Contributions:1 release, 14 commits, 3 PRs in 2 years
vcenternotebooksprmsnette
rmcd-mscb/hydro-param
Feb 2026 - Mar 2026
Contributions:38 reviews, 57 PRs, 130 pushes in 26 days
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