Hi! I’m Tom Colligan. I currently work at Spark Climate Solutions as a Platform Engineer for Scientific Computing on the WIE project.

Previously, I was a scientific software developer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where I led the development of the LPJ-EOSIM Dynamic Global Vegetation model, a process-based model developed for carbon cycle applications. Some fun wins: I optimized LPJ to the point where ~24 hour simulations completed in ~20 minutes, increased the resolution ~3600x, and wrote a Python API for the model. Before that, I was a research scientist at the University of Arizona/University of Montana, working on was basic machine learning in bioinformatics, where I applied LLMs to protein retrieval.

Want to talk about GFPS, Dask, LLMs, HPC, carbon cycle modeling, ML, cloud, geospatial data, or pickleball? Drop me a line.