Moving on from Academia
…and going all-in on Earthmover!
This is an update aimed at my friends and colleagues in the oceanography and climate research community. I have officially left Columbia and am working full steam ahead on my startup Earthmover. Below is an email I sent to my Columbia colleagues which explains my decision.
How I got here
Around 2016, I realized that my lab’s physical oceanography research was majorly bottlenecked by our ability to efficiently work with large volumes of climate data, such as those originating from simulations, satellites, and autonomous sensor systems. I began to pivot my focus from doing basic research to developing software and data infrastructure. This took the form of the Pangeo project, an effort started here at Lamont which grew into a distributed, international, multi-stakeholder project, bridging academia, government, and the private sector. Pangeo also brought millions of dollars in research funding to Lamont, from NSF, NASA, and the Moore Foundation.
Along the way, I made an important discovery about myself: I derive a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction from building tools to enable others. And I love the short feedback cycle of software development — you can release something, receive user feedback, and make a new release all within a few days. This is a fundamentally different style and pace of work compared to basic research.
In the midst of this, the COVID pandemic hit. The pandemic impacted many of us by making us question our established patterns. I was deeply moved by the way the medical community mobilized in response to the crisis and shipped a vaccine in under a year. I saw parallels to the climate crisis. I wanted to be part of a similar mobilization I saw emerging — the growing community of researchers, government organizations, and private-sector companies tackling climate change adaptation and mitigation directly.
At this point, I did a lot of soul searching. On one hand, I loved my oceanography research and had many still-unrealized ideas in the works. On the other hand, I saw that the work we had done with Pangeo was just the tip of the iceberg, and that teams working with climate data were still heavily burdened by inefficient systems and out-dated technology.
Ultimately the decision was clear. By going all-in on the data infrastructure problem, I could point my career in a direction that would be more personally fulfilling and also better aligned with the impact I wanted to have on the planet. This was the genesis for Earthmover.
What is Earthmover?
First of all, why start a company at all? Why not pursue this new direction from my existing position at Columbia? We decided that the best way to reach our desired impact was to develop a commercial cloud data platform and sell it on the open market. Universities simply aren’t set up to offer that type of service, nor could we recruit the type of team we needed in a university context. Finally, I knew that this sort of endeavor would require all of my focus and energy, which would be hard to balance with the competing demands of professorship. This is what tech startups are made for.
Earthmover is a public benefit corporation — a for-profit corporation with a mission written into its charter. Our mission is broad: to empower people to use scientific data to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. There are two co-founders: myself (CEO) and Joe Hamman, a long-time Pangeo collaborator, as CTO. Building on the work started at Lamont, Earthmover is developing a cloud platform which empowers researchers, data scientists, and software developers to work efficiently with massive-scale Earth System data. Our platform has been on the market for about a year, and we’re thrilled to have some great customers already, including Sylvera (a UK-based carbon-credit monitoring service), Jua.ai (a Zurich-based AI weather forecasting company), and the University of Wisconsin. Along the way, we’ve grown to 8 team members and raised venture capital funding.
While it’s still early, Earthmover is on track for success. I’m confident that the company will continue to grow and will have a major impact on how the world interacts with scientific data. Personally, I am extremely energized and fulfilled by this new direction. While I certainly miss my research, I don’t stay up nights worrying that no one is going to figure out how ocean eddies work! Fortunately, there is an abundance of smart, hard-working people in my field. On the other hand, I feel that what we are doing with Earthmover is totally unique — if we don’t do this, maybe nobody will, and the scientific community will be worse off.
My evolving relationship with Columbia
For the past two years I have been on [part time] leave from my position as Associate Professor with Tenure in DEES. During this time, I have continued to supervise students and employees and manage grants as a PI. A central goal in my approach was to make this career pivot minimally disruptive to my colleagues and especially to the early career scientists who have trusted me as a mentor. Most of the people in my lab have now smoothly and successfully transitioned to their next job. I feel proud about how I have navigated this situation.
More longer term, I imagined that I might be able to continue to straddle the line between academia and industry indefinitely, as is common at institutions like Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT. However, that was not to be. My leave came to an end on July 1, and I was asked to choose between returning to teaching full time or resigning. I chose to resign. So I am now no longer employed by or affiliated with Columbia or Lamont.
I feel sad about leaving Columbia. I treasure the relationships I’ve made here over the past decade. I am deeply grateful for all of the support I’ve received from this institution, and from the many individuals who have mentored me and helped advance my career. I believe that the intellectual environment of Lamont is unparalleled in its breadth and impact on the world, and I’m still processing the fact that I’m no longer a part of it.
On the other hand, I believe that this clean separation is best for everyone, allowing us all to fully embrace what’s next. Lamont needs to rebuild its physical oceanography program. And I need to keep all of my focus on Earthmover.
What’s next?
While I am leaving Columbia, I am not leaving science. I see the work we are doing at Earthmover as fundamental to enabling scientific progress and collaboration on a global scale. I know I will continue to collaborate with many of you on both ongoing research projects as well as open source software. You will see me around at conferences. And I’m not leaving NYC either — we are staying in the neighborhood for the foreseeable future.
Here are few ways we can stay in touch:
- You can connect with me personally on LinkedIn and X / Twitter.
- Follow Earthmover on LinkedIn or X / Twitter.
- Sign up for our mailing list.
- If you see a use for our data platform in your lab, please fill out this short form so we can learn more about your use case.
🚀 Onwards and upwards!
