Noam Ross is a computational disease ecologist and open-science leader with 15 years of experience applying mathematical and statistical tools to wildlife and plant disease dynamics, spillover risk, and optimal disease management that balances conservation and public health. As Executive Director and long-time contributor at rOpenSci and now Co-Founder of Grant Witness, he combines hands-on software engineering (including DevOps work automating versioned R Docker builds) with programmatic leadership to make scientific tools more robust, reproducible, and accessible. His work spans ecological forecasting, One Health consulting, and building inclusive research communities that prioritize those historically left out of science. Trained as a PhD ecologist from UC Davis, he pairs deep domain expertise with practical engineering to move models and methods from research into operational use.
15 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Ecology, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Ecology at University of California, Davis
BS, Environmental Science, BS, Environmental Science at Brown University
Run current & prior versions of R using docker. rocker/r-ver, rocker/rstudio, rocker/shiny, rocker/tidyverse, and so on.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
Contributions:4 reviews, 61 commits, 12 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Noam focused on automating and improving the build process for Docker images related to running R versions. They implemented scripts to generate Dockerfiles automatically, streamlined the image build process, and introduced features such as automatically determining image build order. The commits also included enhancements to the installation of R-related packages and the integration of tools like Shiny server and Pandoc.
Contributions:50 commits, 4 pushes, 1 branch in 5 years 1 month
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