Corey White is a Geospatial Research Software Engineer at the Center for Geospatial Analytics at North Carolina State University and the founder and CEO of OpenPlains Inc. He is a core contributor to GRASS, where he develops and maintains tools and addons spanning terrain, hydrologic, and time-series analysis. His research centers on terrain analysis, hydrologic modeling, and topographic change detection, including multi-temporal change detection across the Blue Ridge Escarpment following Hurricane Helene, the body of work that motivates this workshop. He teaches graduate courses in geospatial modeling and UAS mapping at NC State and regularly leads open-source geospatial training for research and professional audiences.

I am a Spatial Data Scientist at UC Davis. My work focuses on developing open-source tools to help land managers and ecologists understand forests using data from drones and other low-cost sensors.

Dewey Dunnington (Ph.D., P.Geo.) is a software engineer and geoscientist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As a software engineer he works on scaling spatial data science using Apache Sedona and Apache Arrow at Wherobots. Dewey is a co-creator of GeoArrow, nanoarrow, and a contributor to the Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC) project. As a geoscientist, he has worked in contaminated site remediation, taught Applied Geomorphology, and has authored more than a dozen articles on lake water and sediment geochemistry. Dewey is an Apache Arrow and Apache Sedona Project Management Committee member, an RStudio-certified tidyverse instructor, an NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship (Doctoral) recipient, and maintainer of dozens of R, Python, C, and C++ libraries at the intersection of geoscience, geospatial data, and enterprise data connectivity.

I am an independent GIS consultant and the founder of Geomermaids, with over 20 years of geospatial experience spanning national and regional spatial data infrastructure projects in France and consulting work now based near Boston. I am a long-time open source advocate, focused on cloud-native and the emerging geospatial stacks. My current work centers on building lean, automatable spatial data pipelines and helping teams move heavy geospatial workloads onto modern, open formats.

JJ is a spatial data science lead with SRF Consulting. His work focuses on streamlining data workflows to support development, infrastructure, and transportation planning efforts. JJ is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Spatial Information Engineering at the University of Maine, where his research focuses on the analysis of real-time phenomena.

Jarrett Keifer is a Senior Geospatial Software Engineer at Element 84, a commercial geospatial consultancy that uses open-source to build effective customer solutions. His interests include education and outreach, geospatial data formats, and high-performance systems/network programming. He enjoys designing systems to operate at scale, particularly to support remote sensing data processing and earth science applications, and has over ten years of experience contributing to open source projects.

Michele Tobias holds a PhD in geography from University of California Davis, as well as an MS from University of Michigan, and a BA from UCLA. She has worked at the UC Davis Library for the past decade as a geospatial data scientist helping researchers with their data needs. Her personal research interests include using open source tools to understand California's sandy beach vegetation and geomorphology. She also has an interest in using her geospatial skills to help underserved research communities. Michele has served on the board of directors for OSGeo (international) and Technocation (OSGeo US), as well as arts non-profit organizations, and is a founding member and coordinator of #maptimeDavis.

Nathan McEachen is the founder, CEO, and CTO of TerraFrame, which specializes in supporting ministries of health and national spatial data infrastructures by building geospatial knowledge infrastructures with open-source GIS, remote sensing, and interoperability solutions. He obtained his master’s degree in computer science from Colorado State University in the United States. He is academically published in the fields of software testing, model-driven engineering, disease intervention, and spatial information sciences. Nathan is involved with the Open Geospatial Consortium and HL7 to help align standards development, enabling more automated data integration across sectors to bring geospatial awareness to LLMs.

Senior Software Engineering Leader at Amazon Maps, leading geospatial data pipelines for last-mile delivery. Leads adoption of OSM-derived datasets, Overture, and open-source GIS tools within Amazon. Tech lead for Amazon's visual and routing artifact generation.