Stonie Cooper joined the Unidata Program Center staff on October 3rd, 2022, as a software engineer. Stonie comes from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), where he was a faculty applied meteorologist/climatologist, managing the Nebraska Mesonet.
Stonie earned a bachelor's degree in natural science education and meteorology at UNL before a brief stray into atmospheric chemistry as a PhD student at Georgia Tech. He returned to UNL's School of Natural Resources to finish his doctoral work, focusing on climate assessments and impacts. He's spent most of his career in the private sector, with experience in operational meteorology, severe weather forecasting, climatology, and climate adjacent industries. His technical expertise in satellite communications, IT security, data warehousing, and machine learning adaptations will all come into play at the Program Center.
Stonie may also be familiar to some in the Unidata community as the owner of and engineer for Planetary Data, Inc., which he left behind to join the Unidata Program Center staff. “I've wanted to be on the Unidata team for decades,” he says, “and the stars finally aligned in a way that allowed me to transition to a role of focusing on a specific task with the purpose of bringing a larger world-view to the software and data used by the atmospheric research community.”
Stonie still resides on a farm in Nebraska, spending his free time on farm activities, fat-tire biking in the snow, ice fishing, running, and getting toasted by his adult children in on-line video games.
Please help us welcome Stonie to the Unidata Program Center Team!
Posted by Brendon Hoch on November 01, 2022 at 09:54 AM MDT #