Ryan Abernathey
Chief Executive Officer at Earthmover
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Abernathey is a CEO and open-source maintainer with 16 years of experience bridging academic earth sciences and scalable scientific software. As co-founder of Earthmover and creator of Pangeo, he builds cloud-native data platforms that operationalize large-scale climate and oceanography analysis. Previously an associate professor and physical oceanographer at Columbia, he led a research group responsible for over 60 peer-reviewed papers on ocean circulation, mixing, and climate. A prolific contributor to projects like xarray and zarr—improving multidimensional grouping, plotting, and array storage—he combines deep domain expertise with hands-on backend engineering and HPC/data-ops experience. Based in New York, he holds a PhD from MIT and is known for translating complex geoscientific workflows into reproducible, production-ready tools.
16 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Climate Physics and Chemistry, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Climate Physics and Chemistry at MITBachelor of Arts (BA), Physics, Bachelor of Arts (BA), Physics at Middlebury College
Github Skills (32)
numerical10
python10
pandas10
fortran10
xray10
bash10
climate-science10
plot10
numpy10
script10
dask10
numerical-methods10
xa10
jupyter-notebook10
ocean-modelling10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
pangeo-data/pangeo
Aug 2017 - Sep 2022
Pangeo website + discussion of general issues related to the project.
Role in this project:
Data Scientist & DevOps Engineer
Data Scientist & DevOps EngineerContributions:9 reviews, 92 commits, 138 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Ryan's contributions primarily involved setting up and configuring a Dask cluster for data analysis within the Pangeo environment. They wrote scripts to launch a Dask scheduler and workers on the Wrangler and Habanero supercomputers. Further, they added and tested a new Jupyter notebook that analyzed the CM2.6 ocean model, demonstrating their involvement in both infrastructure setup and data analysis tasks. They have also demonstrated the capacity to create and test notebooks to analyze large datasets.
discussion-websitepangeo
pydata/xarray
Aug 2015 - Apr 2021
N-D labeled arrays and datasets in Python
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:30 reviews, 15 commits, 42 PRs in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Ryan made significant contributions to the xarray plotting module, addressing bugs and implementing new features related to color mapping and plotting behavior. They focused on modifying the color keyword argument, fixing dependencies, and updating documentation to reflect these changes. Additionally, the user implemented multidimensional groupby functionality and binning capabilities, adding new methods and examples. Furthermore, they fixed issues with dask and Zarr, contributing to the overall functionality of the library.
pythonnetcdfnumpydaskarrays
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