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.
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 was a researcher and intern at NASA Goddard, working on satellite aerosol remote sensing. Two of the tools I wrote there were filed as NASA New Technology Reports — a genuine machine-learning and scientific-computing background that predates the current AI wave rather than riding it.
Today I work fully remote across the Eastern US, 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.
Education
Education
2011 – 2015
A.S. in STEM — High Honors
Frederick Community College · Frederick, MD
GPA 3.816. Martin Kalmar Award for Academic Excellence in Mathematics; Who's Who Among Students in American Colleges & Universities.
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- Shepherd, E. & Yu, H. (Aug 2018). Study of Aerosol Poleward Transport using CATS Observations. NASA GSFC Summer 2018 Intern Poster Session, Greenbelt, MD.
- Berman, M. & Shepherd, E. (Apr 2015). On the Viability of Solar Thermal Fresnel Lens Energy Systems. 2015 Northeast Regional Honors Council, Gettysburg, PA.