About

About

I build the enterprise software that quiet, load-bearing business processes run on. For nearly five years I led development of the Oracle APEX and PL/SQL applications behind a national supplemental-health-insurance underwriting pipeline, and along the way introduced the source control and automated testing the team had been working without and co-designed its first CI/CD pipeline.

Before enterprise software, I spent several years in scientific-computing and machine-learning research. At UMBC, under an NSF CyberTraining grant, I built a K-Nearest-Neighbors pipeline on a high-performance computing cluster to collocate satellite cloud observations with sea-ice data. At NASA Goddard, I worked on satellite aerosol remote sensing and wrote two Python tools for the MODIS Dark Target product that were filed as NASA New Technology Reports — one of them eliminating a proprietary licensing dependency from the processing pipeline. It's a genuine ML and scientific-computing foundation that predates the current AI wave rather than riding it.

Today I work fully remote, bringing that span — from satellite data pipelines to production LLM-to-database integrations and self-hosted infrastructure — to Oracle, health-IT, and developer-tooling problems wherever the team happens to be.

Education

Education

2017 – Present

B.S. Physics — coursework completed, two courses remaining

University of Maryland, Baltimore County · Baltimore, MD

Degree not yet conferred; completion in progress through the UMBC Finish Line Program.

2011 – 2015

A.S. in STEM — High Honors

Frederick Community College · Frederick, MD

Martin Kalmar Award for Academic Excellence in Mathematics; Who's Who Among Students in American Colleges & Universities; AMATYC Student Mathematics League Certificate of Merit (National Mathematics Competition).

2018 – 2018

Advanced Computing for Earth Sciences (ACES) Program

University of Virginia / NASA · Charlottesville, VA

Selective NASA-sponsored intensive in HPC, scientific software engineering, and Earth-science data analysis — 20 students nationally.

Research

Publications & presentations

  1. Shepherd, E., et al. (Dec 2019). Assessing the Use of Forecast Meteorological Analyses to Support Aerosol Retrieval in Near Real-Time. AGU Centennial Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA.
  2. Zhang, Z., Shepherd, E., et al. (Nov 2019). Understanding the Quantitative Connection Between Cloud Opacity and Cloud Optical Thickness Using CALIOP and MODIS Observations. 2019 MODIS/VIIRS Science Team Meeting, College Park, MD.
  3. Zhang, Z., Shepherd, E., & Wang, C. (Jun 2020). Investigation of Anomalous Transparent Clouds Based on MODIS and CALIPSO Observations. 2020 International Radiation Symposium, Thessaloniki, Greece (conference canceled, COVID-19).
  4. Shepherd, E. & Levy, R. (Aug 2019). Streamlining Ground-Truth Validation and Algorithm Improvement for the Dark Target Aerosol Research Product. NASA GSFC Summer 2019 Intern Poster Session, Greenbelt, MD.
  5. Shepherd, E. & Yu, H. (Aug 2018). Study of Aerosol Poleward Transport using CATS Observations. NASA GSFC Summer 2018 Intern Poster Session, Greenbelt, MD.
  6. Berman, M. & Shepherd, E. (Apr 2015). On the Viability of Fresnel Lens Solar Thermal Energy Systems. 2015 Northeast Regional Honors Council, Gettysburg, PA.