I'm Justin Fain, and I'm doing spatial data analysis.
I build tools to answer questions by combining remote sensing, spatial vector, and tabular data. I love to pull techniques from outside the geographic discipline and adapt them to solve interesting problems. I want to apply a bit of lateral thinking to improve existing systems or create something entirely new.
What I Do
Past work has included tracking air and groundwater pollution, predicting future fire risks, assessing drivers of food insecurity, and many other grant-funded projects. I've worked under grants from NASA, NOAA, USDA, NIFA, AMAP, and others.Most recently I developed a fast and accurate model to improve fire emission source attribution in the Arctic. By honing-in on what is burning we can improve upon existing fire emission models and make better predictions about climate and health impacts.
How I Do It
I am dedicated to open source software and believe that we should all strive to make science more accessible. Although I was trained in ESRI and ENVI tools, their closed nature makes them antithetical to the goals of open science.I mainly code in R but I have experience with SQL, Python, and JavaScript. I also have some limited experience in SAS, an interest in Julia, and have played around with the likes of Haskell and a handful of other languages just for fun.
What I'm Up To Now
I'm currently employed by ISciences working on contract as a geospatial software developer in support of the NOAA/NCEI drought.gov portal. I'm supporting updates and upgrades to the site through developing data processing frameworks and helping to move operations to the Google Cloud Platform. Cloud processing gives us the ability to be flexible and innovative in our approaches to tough issues without the need for massive in-house HPC capacity.
Education
B.A. Urban & Regional Planning - Miami University
M.A. Geography - Miami University
GIS Certificate - Miami University
Please note that my GitHub has been dead for some time as I work in private repos and internal systems.
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