Office: Room 323, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 760-9993
Email: salbeke@uwyo.edu

Dr. Shannon Albeke has been part of WyGISC since 2010 and is a Senior Research Scientist and Faculty member. His primary research focuses around applied GIS, programming and statistics. As such, he provides research support for faculty and graduate students within the Program in Ecology as well as many other departments and programs within UW. His teaching centers on database management and applied GIS methods using primarily open source software.

Shannon earned a B.A. in Environmental Sciences with minors in Geography and Geology in 1997 from the University of Colorado - Boulder. He then began an 8-year career as an Aquatic Habitat Biologist for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, and by necessity, learned how to be a GeoSpatial Data Scientist. In 2006, he resigned from CDOW to become a PhD student at the University of Georgia where he worked on Coastal River Otters in Prince William Sound, AK, earning his PhD in 2010.

More information about Shannon's work >

Office: Room 4079B, Engineering
Phone: (307) 766-5229
Email: jian.gong@uwyo.edu

Jian is an interdisciplinary scientist interested in applying computing to diverse fields of science, arts, and engineering. Their goal at the School of Computing is to promote computational science as an exciting toolkit for anyone who would like to try something new in their own research, arts, studies, or businesses. Computing will assist you to become a better thinker, designer, artist, and engineer in unexpected new ways.

In their own research, Jian study complex systems, self-organization, environmental-biological evolution, and the origin of life. They work on NASA-sponsored research projects to help find signatures of life beyond Earth. Jian is also a maker, artist, and owner of a local company in Downtown Laramie called Cosmomakers.

More information about Jian's work >

Office: Room 335, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-2736
Email: jeff.hamerlinck@uwyo.edu

Dr. Jeff Hamerlinck has served as Director of the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center since 2004. In this role he is responsible for guiding the Center's strategic vision and overall operations. As WyGISC Director he serves on the State of Wyoming Governor's GIS Advisory Board and is active in the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). His teaching and research interests range from land-use and environmental planning to spatial data infrastructure management and place-based planning support systems.

Jeff received his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he studied the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in rural community land-use planning. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and holds the designation of GIS Professional (GISP) by the GIS Certification Institute. A 2011 graduate of Leadership Wyoming, Jeff is an avid fly-fisher and day-hiker, and has recently re-discovered recreational tennis.

More information about Jeff's work >

Office: Room 308, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-3709
Email: phodza@uwyo.edu

Paddington Hodza is a Senior Research Scientist at WyGISC. He is a native of Zimbabwe where he completed BSc Surveying and MSc Land and Geographic Information Systems at the University of Zimbabwe. Paddington worked for World Wide Fund for Nature and Environment and Remote Sensing Institute before moving to the U.S. in 2002 to pursue a PhD in Geography at West Virginia University. He joined University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in 2007 where he directed the GIScience Certificate program for which he led the development. He is a certified GIS Professional, licensed FAA Drone Pilot, recipient of Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship and Leadership Wyoming alumnus. He was elected to the UCGIS Board of Directors for a 3-year term beginning in 2019 and serves on UCGIS Education Committee and University of Wyoming Faculty Senate. His current research interests include UAS, multi-modal GIS education, positivity GIS, immersive geo-visualization and spatial data science.

More information about Paddington's work >

Office: Room 4079A, Engineering
Phone: (307) 766-5234
Email: akirby@uwyo.edu

In the School of Computing, I collaborate with researchers across campus to help elevate their high-performance computing needs through the use of UWYO's ARCC and the NWSC's supercomputing resources. I do research in scientific computing on massively parallel supercomputers including NWSC's Cheyenne and Derecho, as well as at leadership-class computing facilities such as Summit (OLCF), Perlmutter (NERSC), Mira (ALCF), Eagle (NREL), and TX-GAIA (MIT).

I’m leading research projects in the fields of Wind Energy and Aerospace, including work with NREL and NASA. In the past, I worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Supercomputing Group (LLSC), as a Postdoctoral Associate developing advanced parallel algorithms for Deep Learning.

I did my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wyoming under the direction of Professor Dimitri Mavriplis where I worked on the development of high-order numerical methods for multi-scale computational fluid dynamics problems. During my Ph.D. studies, I was fortunate to be selected as an NSF Blue Waters Graduate Fellow, in which I performed the highest-fidelity blade-resolved wind farm simulations to date on leadership-class supercomputers! Additionally, I spent several months working with the U.S. ARMY’s CREATE-AV HELIOS Team at NASA Ames Research Center on my doctoral research.

Before changing to the dark side of computational mathematics and engineering, I did an M.S. at Columbia University in Applied Mathematics, and a B.S. in Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

More information about Andrew's work >

Office: Room 331, Agriculture C
Phone: (307) 766-2721
Email: sivan@uwyo.edu

Dr. Ramesh Sivanpillai is a remote sensing scientist with the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center at the University of Wyoming where he teaches remote sensing courses and directs the WyomingView program. He received his B. Sc Physics from PSG College of A&S, M. Sc Environmental Studies from Cochin University of S&T, M. Phil Environmental Sciences from Bharathiar University (all from India), M. S Environmental Sciences & Policy from University Wisconsin - Green Bay, and PhD Forestry from Texas A&M University.

For more than 25 years he has worked on digital processing of remotely sensed data for applications forestry, range-land, agriculture, water bodies, disaster assessment, and land cover/land use studies. He has worked with several national and international agencies, and academic institutions in India, United States of America, Mexico, Mali, Nicaragua, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Kenya, and Australia. He has served on the Board of Directors of AmericaView and is serving on the board of the ASPRS-RMR chapter. He serves as an associate editor in the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing (since 2008) and Frontiers of Earth Science (since 2014).

More information about Ramesh's work >