Todd West
Research Associate
Corvallis, Oregon, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTodd West is a research-focused forest biometrician and software-savvy scientist with roughly 10 years of interdisciplinary experience bridging LiDAR, multispectral remote sensing, and machine learning for precision forestry. Currently a postdoctoral Research Associate at Oregon State University, he develops scalable individual-tree detection, measurement, and inventory pipelines and has built toolchains to process tens of terabytes of point cloud data in minutes. His background spans hands-on forest monitoring and wildlife fieldwork with the Cascades Carnivore Project to production-scale engineering at Microsoft, giving him rare fluency across field data collection, algorithm development, and robust service engineering. An active contributor to open-source tooling (including makernote support in a widely used metadata-extractor .NET repo), he combines rigorous PhD-level forest biometrics with decades of systems and hardware engineering. Known for pragmatic problem-solving—from RAID arrays and handheld LiDAR best practices to high-performance model implementations—he’s comfortable turning messy real-world data into repeatable, production-ready analyses.
10 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Electrical Engineering (Computational Electromagnetics and Digital Signal Processing), MS, Electrical Engineering (Computational Electromagnetics and Digital Signal Processing) at University of WashingtonPhD, Sustainable Forest Management (Forest Biometrics), PhD, Sustainable Forest Management (Forest Biometrics) at Oregon State UniversityBS and BA, Engineering (Electrical) and Studio Art (Oil Painting), BS and BA, Engineering (Electrical) and Studio Art (Oil Painting) at Swarthmore College
Github Skills (12)
net10
asp-net10
dotnet-new10
dotnet10
extraction10
metadata10
csharp10
exif10
metadata-extractor10
information-extraction10
dotnet-core10
exiftool8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
drewnoakes/metadata-extractor-dotnet
Sep 2016 - Dec 2016
Extracts Exif, IPTC, XMP, ICC and other metadata from image, video and audio files
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 5 PRs, 23 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Todd primarily focused on adding support for Reconyx makernotes to the metadata extractor. This involved implementing new classes, methods, and descriptors to parse and extract data from Reconyx camera files. They extended the existing `ExifTiffHandler` class to correctly process the makernotes and subsequently improved the existing code related to Reconyx makernote handling. Further refinements were made to the UltraFire makernote implementation.
netpbmjfifvideometadatajpeg
CascadesCarnivoreProject/Carnassial
Nov 2015 - Dec 2022
Carnassial: Simplifying Remote Camera Data
Contributions:8 releases, 182 commits, 2 PRs in 7 years 2 months
cameracomputer-visiondata-camerasimplifying
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