Cece Hedrick

Cece Hedrick joined the Unidata Program Center (UPC) team on October 16th, 2017 as a software developer. Her first day at the office coincided with the joint meeting of Unidata's Users' and Strategic Advisory Committees, so … we pretty much threw her in the deep end of the pool. On the bright side, Cece got an instant introduction to the community we're working for.

Cece studied astrophysics and computer science at the University of Nebraska. As an astronomer she has worked in a wide range of research categories from supermassive black holes, circumstellar disks, and symbiotic stars to the Martian atmosphere as part of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. As a computer scientist she has also explored a wide range of research topics, such as, bioinformatics, modeling and simulation for war gaming, and user experience/human computer interaction within the learning sciences. As a software developer, Cece has previously worked on military secure messaging and data transfer solutions, cable television software product continuous integration, and space weather prediction and analysis software.

John Leeman joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on January 30th, 2017. John obtained bachelor's degrees in meteorology and geophysics from the University of Oklahoma in 2012, and a PhD in geoscience from Penn State in 2017. He has worked in research fields ranging from gas hydrate thermodynamics to SODAR and boundary layer instrumentation, and did his doctoral work in earthquake physics. John's software development experience includes work on the seafloor process simulator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and telemetry analysis tools for NASA's Morpheus lunar lander project. The common thread amongst all of these projects was “the development of new tools and software to attack previously intractable problems.”

As a researcher himself, John brings first-hand knowledge of how scientists want to interact with their research tools to Unidata. He joined the Unidata Program Center because, he says, “making well tested and reliable tools with which to conduct reproducible science is probably the largest challenge and most needed area of innovation in research today.”

Matt Perna

By Larissa Gordon

Matthew Perna joined the Unidata Program Center (UPC) team on June 6th of 2016 as a systems administrator. A native New Yorker, he moved to Fort Collins, CO from Long Island, NY in April, 2016.

Matt attended the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University before he earned his first Microsoft Systems Engineer (MCSE) in 1998. Since then, he has accrued 21 certifications for Microsoft system engineering.