David Blodgett Candidate Statement 2023

David Blodgett, EDGE Civil Engineer, USGS. Candidate for Information Technology & Interoperability Committee Chair

Bio: Dave is a hydro informatics specialist with the USGS Integrated Modeling and Prediction Division Geo-Intelligence Branch. He is currently working as a hydro-informatics lead across the USGS Water Mission Area and the hydroscience community. Dave holds a B.S. in civil and environmental engineering and an M.S. in water resources engineering form the UW-Madison. Dave started his career with the USGS in 2009 with a focus on hydrology and ecology modeling data. Within the USGS, Dave is a project manager for the National Hydrologic Geospatial Fabric project and a research engineer focusing on next-generation hydrologic data applications. Outside the USGS, Dave is a technical leader in numerous committees and working groups including the Earth Science Information Partners Information Technology and Interoperability working group, the Open Geospatial Consortium hydrology domain working group, and the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee.

Statement of Interest: The opportunity to coordinate IT&I activities in 2019 and 2020 was an honor and a great opportunity to engage with a broad community of IT professionals. Fast forward one global health pandemic and I’m excited to take the IT&I committee into the future. I’ve always valued understanding things at a level that allows me to build intuition for how they work, and I want to help bring that kind of understanding to the community. Having served out the last few months of the previous committee chair’s term, I’ve already got the committee moving in some new directions and am thrilled with the attendance and energy we’ve been able to bring already. I hope to continue this and grow engagement around developing more IT&I content for people to find and use after our webinars take place.