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TLS T.L. Swetnam
  Associate Professor · Computer Science

Open science, 
across the 
natural world. 

Building cyberinfrastructure tools for biology, ecology, agriculture, and earth science — participating in Team Science across dozens of institutions.

01 / Research Network

A constellation of collaborations.

Active projects, the funders behind them, and the domains they share. Hover a node to trace its connections; tap a domain on the perimeter to filter by field.

field-map · live
active project collaboration edge
02 / Selected Work Papers

Eight papers that matter most right now.

A small slice of recent and frequently-cited publications. The full list — including reports, preprints, and book chapters — lives on the publications page.

03 / Teaching Mentoring

Workshops, fellowships, and a learning center.

No formal credit courses; instead, intensive cohorts on the foundations of open science and digital literacy, run through the CyVerse Learning Center and partner programs.

"Foundational Open Science Skills" — a multi-week cohort for early-career scientists, run each spring since 2018.

Co-developed with The Carpentries and Research Bazaar Arizona, the program emphasizes reproducible research, version control, containerization, and the ethics of open data.

I'm also a member of The Carpentries instructor community and a regular collaborator with NSF's Data Science Fellows network.

Affiliations & host institutions
05 / Field Notes Blog

Occasional writing.

Slow-published essays on AI, agriculture, open science, and a year's worth of weather.

06 / CV Path

From a wildland fire crew in Southern Arizona, to an applied artificial intelligence research professional.

Fire ecologist → data scientist → cyberinfrastructure project leader. The arc has its logic, looking back.

My first career was with the U.S. Department of the Interior at Saguaro National Park (2002–2005), on the Rincon Mountains wilderness firecrew.

That work pulled me into a master's with the Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Research Laboratory — using dendrochronology and GIS to reconstruct historical fire regimes in Utah.

During my PhD I worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Coronado National Forest Supervisor's Office (2008–2012) as a Fire Management Specialist, while researching restoration ecology, GIS, and remote sensing in watershed management.

Working with large remotely-sensed datasets is what carried me, eventually, into geoinformatics and cyberinfrastructure for the life and earth sciences.