2026 July ESIP Meeting: Full Schedule

We are a home for Earth science data and computing professionals. Our sessions bring together the community for hands-on, interdisciplinary deep dives as we explore "Bridging Divides: Data, Technology, Community" this year. Learn more about this theme on the ESIP Meetings page.

Session and plenary recordings will be published on the ESIP YouTube Channel.

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8:30am CDT

Federal Data Strategies: Successes and Opportunities for Bridging Divides

Wednesday July 29, 2026 8:30am - 10:00am CDT

RH 4.314

Collaborative Notes

A continuation of sessions on Federal Data Strategies that started in 2023, this session is a venue for federal agencies to share opportunities for collaborations that will maximize the impact of investments in Earth science data resources. Federal agency representatives will address: emerging joint-agency opportunities in developing open data ecosystems; improving coordination among agencies in data management resource investments; innovative approaches to leverage existing Federal data investments to move from access to integration; and coordinating Federal agencies to facilitate benefits of artificial intelligence. Followed by discussion and audience input on the ESIP meeting theme.

Audience
Federal government data practitioners; ESIP program committee; connectors; users of federal data who want to understand how agency activities will influence data coordination and integration

Speakers

Raleigh Martin

Program Director, U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)

Raleigh L. Martin is a Program Director in the Directorate for Geosciences (NSF) at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Raleigh’s portfolio includes programs related to open science, data management, and computing in the geosciences.

Leslie Hsu

Physical Scientist, U.S. Geological Survey

Jessica Morgan

NESDIS Assistant Chief Data Officer, NOAA

Jessica is the Assistant Chief Data Officer (ACDO) of the NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), a senior expert advisor on scientific data management, responsible for: managing the agency’s inventory of satellite data and archived data holdings... Read More →

Nino Chkhenkeli

Ag Data Commons and Scientific Research Data Services Lead, USDA

Joe Fillingham

NOAA Data Governance Lead and ACDO, NOAA

Special Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation & Prediction (ASEOP) and the Alternate Designated Federal Officer (DFO) for the NOAA Science Advisory Board (SAB) in the NOAA Research Office of Science Support.

Charles Schmitt

Director, Office of Data Science, NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Steve Crawford

Program Executive, NASA

Wednesday July 29, 2026 8:30am - 10:00am CDT
RH 4.314

Data Stewardship, Governance, & Resilience

11:00am CDT

Building Technical Know-How Through Innovation Seed-Funding and Community

Wednesday July 29, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT

RH 4.314

Collaborative Notes

New projects bring new technical skill needs at every career stage. Through small projects, prototyping, and community input, programs like the ESIP Lab and the USGS Community for Data Integration (CDI) provide pathways for researchers to experiment with technology development in a low-stakes environment, gaining skills to leverage new data, tools, and AI technologies. This session brings together program managers, funded PIs, and other ESIP attendees to share lessons learned in building technical capacity. Goals include helping attendees understand how these programs differ from normal funded projects, presenting what leads to success, and gathering input on what would help attendees succeed.

Audience
USGS Community for Data Integration seed-funded project members; ESIP Lab members; anyone interested in learning more by applying for or using the products of these two programs

Speakers

Leslie Hsu

Physical Scientist, U.S. Geological Survey

Aaron Friesz

Technical Community Director, ESIP

Lauren Koenig

Data Scientist, U.S. Geological Survey

data pipelines, reproducible workflows, data engineering, surface water quality, biogeochemistry

Coral Howe

Geospatial Analyst (Physical Scientist), USGS

Bojan Milinic

Chris Sherwood

Research oceanographer, US Geological Survey

Brandon Waters

Hydrologic Technician - Network Integrations & Innovation, U.S. Geological Survey - Colorado Water Science Center

NWDTW 2026
Poster Title - USGS Applications of Wingtra UAS: Photogrammetry & Lidar
Poster Description: USGS applications of the WingtraOne Gen II for high‑resolution photogrammetry and lidar mapping across two major projects: monitoring habitat conditions on Breton Island, Louisiana, and documenting geomorphic change following the July 2025 Guadalupe River flood in Texas. Using... Read More →

Hazel Mebius

Mike O'Donnell

Biologist, USGS

Sean Thiboldeaux

U.S. Geological Survey

Wednesday July 29, 2026 11:00am - 12:30pm CDT
RH 4.314

Community, Education, & Capacity Building

2:00pm CDT

Bridging Discipline Divides: Applying AI for Curation

Wednesday July 29, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT

RH 4.314

Collaborative Notes

Metadata curation deals with many processes that can be substantially accelerated through AI, including selecting relevant terms from large controlled vocabularies, drafting descriptions, and extracting basic information from resources being described. This session brings together challenges, works in progress, and successes from several NASA sciences on incorporating AI techniques into curation workflows. We feature presentations from all five NASA science areas — Heliophysics, Astrophysics, Earth Science, Planetary Science, and Biological and Physical Sciences — balanced with discussion for attendees to learn from others' work and collaboratively incorporate that progress into their own curation workflows for data, software, and other science resources.

Session Chairs
(Heliophysics) Rebecca Ringuette, Lead
(Astrophysics) Vandana Desai
(Astrophysics) Susan Mullally
(Earth Science) Elisabeth Huffer
(Planetary Science) Lynn Neakrase
(Biological and Physical Sciences) Walter Alvarado
(ESIP Semantic Technologies WG Lead) Cogan Shimizu

Session Presenters
Kelly Lockhart: Extracting Data and Software Citations in SciX: Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
John Wu: Assessing mission impact through automated AI-powered bibliometrics
Nick Susemiehl: AI-Accelerated Literature Data Extraction and other AI Projects at IPAC
David Nilsen: Extracting metadata from Data Files using AI
Lynn Neakrase: NASA Planetary Data System: AI for Data Curation
Walter Alvarado: Applying AI methods to Accelerate Curation in Space Biology
Shawn Polson: Building AI Agents for Heliophysics Software Metadata Extraction and Validation
Amanda Butler: Leveraging KG and MCP servers for space life sciences data analysis

Audience
ESIP Semantic Technologies Committee members; ESIP Data Stewardship and Machine Learning Cluster members; curators and data stewards in any science looking for new methods; repository managers seeking to streamline metadata workflows

Speakers

John Wu

Associate Astronomer | Applied AI Scientist, Space Telescope Science Institute

John Wu is an Associate Astronomer and the Applied AI Scientist at Space Telescope Science Institute. He also holds visiting appointments at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, and in the Department of Computer Science.

Rebecca Ringuette

Senior Open Science Scientist, Heliophysics Digital Resource Library at NASA Goddard

Heliophysics infrastructure (e.g. archives, data access/utilization), making resources (archives, software, notebooks, etc) more discoverable and open, more level citation (software and models in addition to data), how to make science reproducible and interactive, and current efforts... Read More →

Elisabeth Huffer

Information Systems Engineer, Lingua Logica

Cogan Shimizu

Shawn Polson

Research Software Engineer, LASP

Shawn Polson is a software engineer who got his Masters in Computer Science from CU Boulder in 2020. He has worked at LASP since 2015. He is the Tech Lead of the Python in Heliophysics Community (PyHC) and works on the SUDA SDC for NASA's Europa Clipper. He also serves on LASP's AI... Read More →

Vandana Desai

Walter Alvarado

Nick Susemiehl

Amanda Butler

Kelly Lockhart

Technical Lead, Science Explorer, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

Lynn Neakrase

David Nilsen

Susan Mullally

Wednesday July 29, 2026 2:00pm - 3:30pm CDT
RH 4.314

AI & Intelligent Systems

4:00pm CDT

Enhancing Earth Science Data Stewardship with AI: Real-World Examples and Experiences

Wednesday July 29, 2026 4:00pm - 5:30pm CDT

RH 4.314

Collaborative Notes

AI capabilities are developing tremendously quickly, creating opportunities for those supporting the research data enterprise to do their work in new or more efficient ways. But the rapid pace also creates divides: some people have access to the time, expertise, and resources to learn how to apply AI tools, while others do not. This session (Part 2 of the AI curation series) shares real-world experiences and lessons learned about how people are applying specific AI tools to the work of managing and making research data useful. Lightning talks followed by a roundtable discussion covering what is working well, what has been tried but is not ready for prime time, and key considerations and cautions.

Presentations
Dave Blodgett: Experiences with agent-based AI for software package and reproducible data pipeline development
Mike O’Donnell: Integrating Scientific Integrity into AI‑Driven Literature Synthesis
Carolina Berys: From Cruise Reports to Structured Metadata: What We Learned Using LLMs at CCHDO
Ryan Berkheimer: NOAA Foundations for Cognitive AI
Althea Marks: A FAIR Data Pipeline: From Pipe Dream to Reality with GenAI
Jordan Read: From Financial Ledgers to Dataset Citations: CUAHSI's Use of AI Across a Data Management Spectrum

Audience
Those with a success story or cautionary tale about applying AI to research data management; those who want to understand how AI might help address their own challenges and tasks

Speakers

Karen Stocks

Director, Geological Data Center, University of California San Diego

Leslie Hsu

Physical Scientist, U.S. Geological Survey

David Blodgett

Civil Engineer, U.S. Geological Survey

Ryan Berkheimer

Physical Scientist, DOC/NOAA/NESDIS/NCEI

Carolina Berys-Gonzalez

Data Manager, CCHDO/SIO/UCSD

Althea Marks

Data Scientist, University of Washington

Marine ecologist turned data scientist and accidental software engineer. I maintain and develop the open-source ARTIS (Aquatic Resources Trade in Species) model and FAIR data pipeline. ARTIS ingests international datasets to estimate trade and consumption flow of fish and other aquatic... Read More →