Shawn Serbin
Supervisory Research Physical Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Highland, Maryland, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolShawn Serbin is a Supervisory Research Physical Scientist at NASA Goddard with 12 years of interdisciplinary experience integrating remote sensing, forest ecology, plant physiology, spectroscopy, and ecosystem modeling. He bridges field ecology and computational science, contributing backend improvements to the well-known PEcAn predictive ecosystem toolbox and maintaining reproducible data workflows shared via ResearchGate and Figshare. His career spans academia and national labs—including professorial work at Stony Brook and multiple roles at Brookhaven—where he led biogeochemical and statistical analyses that translate spectral measurements into ecosystem function. Trained with a PhD in Forest and Wildlife Ecology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he pairs rigorous experimental design with practical programming to solve large-scale ecological questions. Not obvious from titles alone, he frequently connects instrument-level spectroscopy to model-ready datasets, enabling better scaling from leaf to landscape. Based in Highland, Maryland, he combines leadership, hands-on data curation, and open-science practices to advance remote sensing applications in ecology.
12 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Forest and Wildlife Ecology, PhD, Forest and Wildlife Ecology at University of Wisconsin-MadisonBA, Telecommunications and GIS, BA, Telecommunications and GIS at Michigan State University
Github Skills (7)
netcdf10
r10
scripting9
shell9
version-control9
script9
sh9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
PecanProject/pecan
May 2014 - Oct 2022
The Predictive Ecosystem Analyzer (PEcAn) is an integrated ecological bioinformatics toolbox.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:37 reviews, 594 commits, 115 PRs in 8 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Shawn primarily focused on maintaining and updating the existing codebase, implementing minor improvements. Their work included minor updates to installation scripts and applying changes to the data handling, model configuration files. They have made contributions across various aspects of the project, including fixing issues related to running models, and general cleanup.
forecastingplantspecanbioinformaticscyberinfrastructure
TESTgroup-BNL/Viskari_etal_ED2_radiation_uncertainty
Nov 2018 - Dec 2020
Contributions:2 releases, 12 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 1 month
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