Meet Emma, an application developer at Development Seed. Passionate about geography, data, and code, she seeks to build valuable, map-centric tools that bring compelling data and visualizations to researchers and decision-makers. Emma loves challenges that include wrangling data together, leveraging databases for spatial analyses, simplifying workflows for researchers and technical users, and building interactive apps to engage the public.

With a B.S. in Biology from Kennesaw State University in Georgia, Emma began her geospatial career while obtaining her M.S. in Environmental Science at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Since then, she’s worked in private and public sector roles, fueling her love of technology and leading her to exciting projects and responsibilities. This has included supporting Emergency Management operations for the City of Charleston during Atlantic Hurricane Seasons.

Emma now works on projects to help researchers efficiently discover and access geospatial data, much of which is satellite focused. She gets excited about tackling large-scale problems that include evolving data ingestion pipelines at the world-wide scale, integrating observability and metrics into a large system of various application services, and implementing flexible database structures + APIs to support dynamically-driven UI/UX.

Emma is deeply involved in planning and developing solutions to ensure end-users can seamlessly visualize and interact with cataloged geospatial data. Despite the complexity, Emma thrives thanks to the support and collaboration of a talented team across NASA, UAH, and DevSeed. These engineers collectively aim to make satellite-derived geospatial data easily discoverable and accessible. This creative and collaborative problem-solving approach is incredibly rewarding, as their success enables downstream scientific analysis of Earth systems.

While coding to her heart’s content daily, Emma also loves to get outside as much as possible. When not traveling or exploring local trails & beaches with friends and family, you can often find her on the water rowing with her local club, biking or jogging around town, shooting hoops at a nearby park, or simply grilling in her backyard.

Emma loves taking the wheel - especially when it means driving stick-shift!