When Laurie says “Well, this isn’t exactly rocket science,” we’d be well-advised to listen; she actually was a rocket scientist. After her physics degree at Iowa State, she worked as a scientific programmer at the aerospace divisions of General Dynamics and Martin Marietta on orbital mechanics and other satellite-related projects. The ups and downs of the defense industry eventually began to wear on her, and in 1992 she came to Boulder to work at NCAR, gradually moving into NWP activities. Laurie joined the DTC as a software engineer in 2008, and since then has been a go-to contributor for several projects that involve the NEMS modeling system from EMC, in particular the NMMB dynamic core now in active development. A focus of these efforts has been to port, configure and test a variety of model configurations on different computing platforms. Along the way she has worked with Jamie Wolff on NAM testing on the NCAR Yellowstone computing system, with Isidora Jankov on NARRE (North American Rapid Refresh Ensemble) related testing on NOAA’s Zeus computing system, and with Greg Thompson on microphysics/radiation coupling, also on the Yellowstone system. She has also been working with DTC and EMC staff to develop some basic user guides for the NEMS community. Given these efforts, it’s not surprising that she would judge her most valuable and enjoyable tasks to be those that contribute to community support, and that involve interaction at a working level with EMC and DTC colleagues.
Perhaps the requirements of a detail-demanding job at DTC do carry over, for better or worse, into non-work time; this would help to explain the interest in quilting suggested by the picture!
