Colby Lemon

Background

About Colby Lemon

I know, I need to write something here. If I were looking for a job, I probably already would've. You wouldn't want to hire me, anyway, as I'm perpetually behind on all my projects. And now I'm wasting my time editing my LinkedIn profile! Anyway, I do research on the magnetosphere, and how the space environment affects the satellites that fly through it. At Aerospace, we do a bunch of different stuff. I primarily seem to do 3 things: I develop numerical models to study magnetospheric physics (essentially "space weather"), I develop numerical models to study deep dielectric charging (i.e. what happens to materials in space that are exposed to the energetic electron environment of the radiation belts), and I develop plasma instruments for space flight (electrostatic analyzers and mass spectrometers). Despite being number two on my skills list endorsements here, I don't really know IDL very well. My mortgage broker was the first person to endorse me for IDL, and my colleagues just assume I know IDL because my LinkedIn profile says I do. It's been fun to watch, and I hope you will endorse me for IDL, too. Actually, I write most of my data analysis scripts in Python since 2007 or so, and before that MATLAB. I'm toying with Julia now. I'm hoping I can eventually use Julia as a C/C++/Fortran replacement, at least for some projects. It would also work well as data analysis scripting language, but Python is becoming so entrenched that I expect I'll be writing programs in it for a while, and that's fine. So I basically do a lot of programming, but I also write a lot of emails when I'm not programming or reading emails. I also read and write proposals and papers sometimes. It's more fun than I'm probably making it sound, because I've always loved physics and math and stuff like that, and my LinkedIn endorsements are a testament that that's what I do!