Dr. Nathan Swain is the Director of Development Services at Aquaveo specializing in developing open-source web solutions for water resources modeling, hydroinformatics, and GIS applications. He completed a Ph.D. at Brigham Young University with an emphasis on Civil and Environmental Engineering and Hydroinformatics. His research culminated in the development of Tethys Platform, an open-source, geospatial web application development framework.
Dr. Michael Souffront has more than 15 years of experience working in the Earth Sciences field. He specializes in hydrologic modeling workflow automation, data management, and visualization solutions. He completed a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering at Brigham Young University with an emphasis on hydroinformatics. He also holds degrees from Utah State University and Universidad Central del Este in the Dominican Republic. Dr. Souffront is a current member of the GEOGLOWS Steering Committee where he supports GEOGLOWS efforts in collaboration with organizations that include ECMWF, NOAA, NASA, WMO, and the World Bank. He is also a Project Engineer at Aquaveo from where he continues to support GEOGLOWS development and maintenance, implement and integrate new capabilities into the Tethys Platform open-source framework, and work on a variety of Earth Science projects.
Dr. Norm Jones is a professor in the Civil and Construction Engineering Department at Brigham Young University where he has been on the faculty since 1991. He earned his BS degree in Civil Engineering at BYU and his MS and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He was the director of the BYU Environmental Modeling Research Laboratory where he supervised the development of the Groundwater Modeling System software. He helped found Aquaveo, LLC in 2007. He was the principal investigator for the CI-WATER grant funded by the National Science Foundation where the original Tethys Platform was developed. His current research interests involve assessing groundwater storage changes and aquifer sustainability using Earth observations. He has 87 peer-reviewed publications and has been a PI or Co-I on 26 externally funded projects totaling $22M. He served 6 years as department chair. He has received several awards, including the 2021 John Hem Award for Science and Engineering by the National Groundwater Association and the 2001 ASCE Walter L Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize.