Tom Nicholas

Hi there 👋

I'm a physicist turned scientific software engineer. I contribute to open source projects like Xarray (as a core developer) and various other projects within the Pangeo sphere.

I currently work at Earthmover, a Public Benefit Corporation building "GitHub for data" on top of the open source Pangeo stack.

Previously I worked at [C]Worthy, a non-profit focused research organisation building tools to verify that ocean-based carbon dioxide removal approaches would be effective and safe.

Before that I worked as a Research Software Engineer and Oceanographer at Columbia University. I worked with Ryan Abernathey as part of the Climate Data Science Lab, and as part of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Before that I completed a PhD in computational plasma physics for nuclear fusion, where I first got interested in the challenges of processing and sharing large amounts of scientific data.

Some projects I'm particularly proud of / excited about and my role in them:

• Xarray (core maintainer)
• Xarray-DataTree (original author, now folded into xarray upstream)
• VirtualiZarr (original author and lead developer)
• Cubed (cheerleader and author of the Cubed-Xarray integration)
• FROST (originator)

I'm interested in climate change as a physical problem and as a societal challenge, and in accelerating scientists' everyday work through better software tools.

You can reach me at tom at earthmover dot io