Tom Shanks

I build geographic data systems. My work spans complex data migrations, spatial warehouses, healthcare ETL, and vessel screening against live AIS positions. I work mainly in Python and SQL, using Rust where throughput matters.

I studied geography at CU Denver, focused on urban planning and disaster resilience. As a graduate research assistant, I worked with principal investigator Esther Sullivan and Andrew Rumbach on geospatial databases and automated workflows for NSF disaster-recovery research. I learned engineering by building the systems the analysis required. The projects on this site run on my own hardware: an ADS-B receiver that has logged over a million aircraft messages and a tree-crown classifier built from free LiDAR and satellite data.