Richard (RJ) Sheperd is a Software Engineer with Spatial Informatics Group. He has more than a decade of experience as a GIS technician and software engineer. He holds a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley, a GIS Certificate from Portland State University, and a nanodegree in Data Science from Udacity.

RJ is a member of the software development team working on SIG’s Joint Venture with the USFS Missoula Fire Lab to decouple the science analytics in the code of their legacy modeling software and modernize the UI. This framework allows for near-real time updates to the science as it is developed and an improved user experience, a paradigm shift for the software suite. The first test case of this framework is BehavePlus, the foundational fire behavior modeling software.