Pete Pokrandt of the University of Wisconsin, Madison has been awarded the 2019 Russell L. DeSouza Award by the Unidata Users committee. The DeSouza Award honors “individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences.”

Pokrandt has been supporting the needs of geoscience data users at the University of Wisconsin and around the Unidata community since the 1990s; he served on the Unidata Users Committee from 2015 through 2018.

Shay Carter joined the Unidata team on September 3rd, 2019 as a Software Engineer and Programmer. Originally from Canada, she moved from Phoenix, Arizona to take over this new position.

Shay earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from Arizona State University (ASU). Her undergraduate studies consisted of a major in Earth and Space Exploration, with a minor in Computational Mathematical Sciences. She also graduated from Barrett, the Honors College at ASU. She went on to pursue a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering, where she studied stem cells and developed her own genetic quantification algorithm and program in Java. She has spent the last 9 years working at the Mars Space Flight Facility at ASU, and has primarily been a Software Developer on the JMARS GIS program.