North Dakota NASA Space Grant Consortium

Meet the Staff

Dr. Santhosh Seelan
Director
Tel: (701) 777-2355
Email: Seelan@space.edu

 

 

Santhosh Seelan joined UND's Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium in 1998 where he helped establish a sophisticated geospatial lab and lead a NASA sponsored project on Crop and Range Alert System aimed at promoting geospatial technologies among farmers and ranchers of the Upper Midwest. This project involves near real time delivery of satellite data products and services to end users, application development, and training. The project had grown from ten participating end users in 1999 to over six hundred by 2005. Before joining UND, Seelan worked as a Land Information Consultant with Terralink, Wellington, a New Zealand government owned enterprise, creating a nationwide land cover database using SPOT, Landsat and IRS imagery. Prior to that, he worked with India's remote sensing program for 17 years, initially in applications development, and later as Head of India's satellite data distribution center and Project Director, Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS) data distribution. His early work on researching the use of remote sensing for targeting groundwater, and his later contributions to India's technology mission on drinking water through practical use of the technology, earned him nationwide recognition and a nomination for the National Mineral Award. He has served on the IRS Mission Management Board, Remote Sensing Applications Mission Council of India, and the Prime Ministers Task Force on providing drinking water to the rural population of India. Preceding his involvement with India's remote sensing program, he had worked with a consultancy firm, providing natural resource management solutions. Seelan has authored or co-authored over 150 articles, conference papers, technical reports, book, book chapters and abstracts.

Caitlin Nolby
Coordinator
Tel: (701) 777-4856
Email: cnolby@space.edu

 

Caitlin has always loved space.  Although her interest began at a young age, it was her high school physics teacher who truly encouraged her to pursue a STEM degree through his ability to make science both engaging and fun.  Being lucky enough to have such wonderful educators, she decided she wanted to help inspire others to study STEM fields through outreach and education.

As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, she was a teaching assistant for an introductory astronomy course, and began to understand what it meant to communicate with those who don’t have a strong interest in science, let alone space.  Following her B.S. in Astrophysics, she decided to attend graduate school at the University of North Dakota, where she helped to coordinate numerous outreach events like star parties, visits to classrooms, the Transit of Venus viewing, and International Observe the Moon Night.

Her thesis work involved teaching Observational Astronomy to high school students for two weeks and studying the impact various teaching styles can have on learners.  In the fall of 2012, she graduated with her M.S. in Space Studies after completing an internship at Marshall Space Flight Center.  Her research at NASA focused on monitoring the dust production of outbursting comets.

She is very excited about being the new coordinator for NDSG and looks forward to being a part of helping encourage STEM education throughout North Dakota.

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