Last year the Asteroid Institute expanded its engineering team with the hire of software engineer, Kathleen Kiker. Kathleen joined the ADAM team from Lockheed Martin where she led the development for the latest releases of large-scale Fortran and C++ physics modelling codes to run on high performance computers (HPC). Her prior research focused on Black Hole formation using Cloudy simulation software.

As a key member of the ADAM engineering team, Kathleen will focus on adding orbit determination to the ADAM workflow, building the data pipeline from observed celestial object positions on the sky to predictive orbits. This involves integrating and testing open source astrodynamics software with the ADAM backend using Apache Beam, an open-source Java SDK (Software Development Kit) for creating data processing pipelines.

Her work is important to the field of planetary defense because the community will be able to run orbit determination simply at scale directly with ADAM, without having to input data manually and configuring a myriad of settings. In other words, this capability means observation data can be put into ADAM, generate orbits, do orbit propagation, and calculate impact probability all with one single tool.

Kathleen received her BS in Physics with honors from the New College of Florida and her MS in Physics from George Mason University.