Kealan Hennessy

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT KEALAN HENNESSY

I am a scientific programmer at the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, where I help to maintain and expand the GISS climate model, ModelE. At the moment, my work centers around improving the Land Surface Model (LSM) component of ModelE.I enjoy drawing from many disciplines and past experiences to engage in the creative as well as the scholarly aspects of my academic ventures. From a technical standpoint, I am well-versed in different fields of applied mathematics (e.g, complex & functional analysis), physics (fluid mechanics and turbulence, in particular) and high performance scientific computing. My past experience in these areas include producing and validating frameworks of code for modeling and design optimization (including pre/post-processing and visualisation of large data sets), which has often involved working with multiple programming languages (e.g, FORTRAN, Julia and Python). I am also continuously exploring areas of research with which I am (at present) largely unfamiliar; in this regard, I try to think of myself as a lifelong student. For example, I have a growing interest in machine learning as it pertains to the data-driven discovery of complex/highly nonlinear dynamical systems. I am especially curious about the use of recent advances in ML/AI to improve sub-grid parameterisations for state-of-the-art climate models.