Scott Loarie
Executive Director at iNaturalist
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolScott Loarie is an environmental scientist-turned-technology leader with 15 years of experience scaling iNaturalist from a master's project into a global citizen science platform with millions of participants. As Executive Director and long-time co-director, he combines hands-on backend development (notably contributing to the Rails app and database schema work) with strategic leadership in conservation science. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Policy from Duke and advanced degrees from Stanford, grounding his product decisions in rigorous research. Scott’s career spans academia, nonprofit leadership, and applied web development, including climate and agricultural modeling projects at Carnegie Institution. Based in San Francisco, he brings a rare blend of field-focused biodiversity expertise and practical engineering chops—he jokes he’s a scientist who likes to pretend he can also code, but his contributions to inaturalist.org prove otherwise.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Environmental Science and Policy, Ph.D., Environmental Science and Policy at Duke UniversityMS, Biological Sciences, MS, Biological Sciences at Stanford University
Spanish
Github Skills (10)
database-migrations10
database-migration10
schema-design10
postgresql10
schema10
sql10
database-design10
db-schema10
database-schema10
javascript6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
inaturalist/inaturalist
Feb 2011 - Jun 2022
The Rails app behind iNaturalist.org
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:44 reviews, 1015 commits, 133 PRs in 11 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Scott primarily focused on resolving schema conflicts, specifically in a JavaScript file, which likely involves the implementation of backend logic. The user modified database schemas. The user addressed database issues and database schema changes. This includes adding and modifying database fields and creating migrations.
rails-app
loarie/loarie.github.io
Nov 2015 - Nov 2020
Contributions:212 commits, 227 pushes, 1 branch in 5 years 1 month
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