Daniel Da Silva
Research Engineer - NASA Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute at University of Maryland Baltimore County
Washington DC-Baltimore Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Da Silva is a research engineer and AI/ML practitioner with 12 years of experience applying advanced machine learning and software engineering to NASA-scale space science problems. Currently leading projects at the NASA Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute, he architects data discovery platforms, space weather forecasting systems, and fine-tunes foundation models for heliophysics, blending FAIR open-science practices with production-grade engineering. His background spans Silicon Valley at Google, startups, and flight-instrument engineering, and he pairs a PhD in Aerospace Engineering with hands-on CUDA-accelerated simulations and deep learning (diffusion models, PINNs, Fourier Neural Operators). An active open-source contributor, he fixed core NumPy array and dtype edge cases and added robust tests, demonstrating a focus on reliability in scientific tooling. Notably, he has published first-author work in venues like NeurIPS workshops and Space Weather and led a team to deploy a public NASA heliophysics data portal.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityBachelor's degree, Mathematics, Bachelor's degree, Mathematics at University of MarylandDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Aerospace Engineering Sciences at University of Colorado Boulder
Github Skills (13)
array-iterator10
array-comparison10
set-operations10
python10
array-merge10
operation10
numpy10
test-automation10
testing10
data-structure9
data-structures9
c178
c118
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
numpy/numpy
Feb 2014 - Nov 2022
The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 review, 15 commits, 4 PRs in 8 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily focused on bug fixes and improvements related to array operations and data type handling within the NumPy library. They addressed issues such as infinite recursion in string formatting, deepcopying of zero-dimensional arrays, and incorrect behavior with user-defined data types. Additionally, the user contributed to test cases, ensuring the quality and reliability of the library by adding tests for the corrected functionalities and fixing build issues in directories with whitespace. The user's work involved modifying core files related to multi-array operations, testing, and data type definitions.
pythonscientific-computingnumpy
ddasilva/dmsp-dispersion-detection
Sep 2020 - Nov 2022
Model to automatically identify Cusp Ion-Energy Dispersion Events from DMSP satellite data, associated with publications da Silva et al. 2022 and 2024
Contributions:17 commits, 11 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years 2 months
cuspphysicsmagnetosphere
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