Ömer Özak is an associate professor and economic researcher based in Dallas with 12 years of academic and policy-focused experience in macroeconomics, monetary economics, technological and economic growth, international economics, and complexity. He holds a Ph.D. from Brown University and combines rigorous theoretical modeling with computational forecasting—work that spans university teaching, research fellowships, and policy analysis. At Southern Methodist University and IZA he blends advanced macroeconomic theory with data-driven methods, and has contributed code to open-source geospatial tooling, extending python-rasterstats to handle GeoRasters and improved raster clipping outputs. His background in mathematics and early career roles in national planning and tax/trade analysis give him a rare mix of formal modeling skills and practical policy experience. Colleagues value him for tackling large-scale growth and technological transition questions with both analytical depth and computational pragmatism.
12 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Mathematics, MS, Mathematics at Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Ph.D., Economics, Ph.D., Economics at Brown University
Associate Degree, Marketing and Publicity, Associate Degree, Marketing and Publicity at Politécnico Grancolombiano
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Colegio Andino (Deutsche Schule)
Summary statistics of geospatial raster datasets based on vector geometries.
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Contributions:14 commits, 1 PR, 6 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Ömer primarily contributed to the development of the `python-rasterstats` library, focusing on adding functionality to compute and output raster statistics based on vector geometries. Their work involved implementing a new option for returning the clipped raster, geo-transform, and nodata value. The user also updated the library to support the `GeoRasters` format, including improvements to test functions and to ensure the code functions correctly with version 1 of the `rasterio` package. Furthermore, the user worked on integrating additional statistics functions.
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