Nicole Corbin

Nicole Corbin joined the Unidata Program Center on February 1st, 2021 as an Educational Designer. Prior to joining Unidata, Nicole created learning content and educational experiences for technical support staff at Esri focusing on desktop GIS, Microsoft Windows administration, Python, and customer service. Nicole is passionate about instructional design and is always keeping up on the latest in learning sciences. Her professional interests include adult learning theories, inquiry-based learning, and modular/micro-learning.

Although she's been working in the GIS sector for the past five years, Nicole's background is in meteorology. She received both her Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Meteorology from North Carolina State University. It was there that she first became interested in discipline-based education research and pedagogy, and was able to experiment with creating educational content for university students. Her very first educational module covered hail growth processes. Now, at Unidata, she is excited to continue creating learning and outreach content for the greater Earth systems science community.

Members of the Unidata Program Center staff will be attending the 101st annual American Meteorology Society meeting, to be held virtually 9-15 January 2021. The schedule below lists sessions or posters presented by staff members. It also lists times when we'll be available to chat in our AMS Virtual Booth.

Note: while the larger UCAR organization has an official booth in the virtual exhibit hall, Unidata has chosen a system we think makes video chat interactions a little easier. We've set up a separate site that allows you to join us via the Airmeet virtual events platform. We hope you'll stop by with questions, or just to chat, during our exhibit hours.

In the spring of 2020, Unidata made an offer of resources through the Science Gateway project in order to facilitate online learning in response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. Since that time, nearly 440 users — mostly undergraduates in atmospheric science programs — have been able to take advantage of cloud-based resources to access pre-configured computational notebooks for learning and teaching objectives.

For the spring 2021 term, Unidata is once again offering to provide universities (or individual instructors) access to cloud-based JupyterHub servers tailored to the needs of university atmospheric science courses and workshops. By using the Unidata Science Gateway, instructors can add Jupyter notebooks used in their coursework to a dedicated JupyterHub hosted using Unidata's resources in the NSF Jetstream cloud. Once logged in to the JupyterHub, individual students access pre-configured computing environments that allow them to work with the notebooks interactively, making and saving their own alterations to existing notebooks or creating their own new notebooks.

Well, we all know 2020 has been an odd year, and of course that extends to Unidata's participation in the American Geophysical Union 2020 Fall meeting, December 7-11 2020, in cyberspace. No one from the entire UCAR organization is travelling this conference season, nor will members of the Unidata staff be presenting virtual talks or posters at the fall AGU meeting.

That doesn't mean we don't want to chat with you about your data and software needs, about how you're holding your classes or doing your research in this unusual year. We'll have a “virtual booth” set up with a video networking space using the Airmeet platform. Staff members will be available to talk during the AGU's preferred exhibit hall.

Hailey Johnson

Hailey Johnson joined the Unidata software development team on August 17th, 2020. Hailey majored in Computer Science and Earth and Ocean Science at Duke University, and briefly worked as a DevOps Engineer at Microsoft before enrolling in the Geological Sciences graduate program at the University of Florida. She will receive her Ph.D. in December, 2020.

Hailey's doctoral work focused on coastal morphology and nearshore oceanography, with minor focuses in both Computer Engineering and Educational Technology. She is excited to join Unidata because its mission fits so well with her passion for leveraging software to support the earth science community in both research and outreach.