Work Experience

A summary of my professional life since leaving high school. Various odd student jobs are not included.

Note that the years betwen 2014 and now are actually one continuous employment. Coincicentally my agency has changed its name more or less at the same time as my role has changed.

Agency for Climate Data

Head of Function: 2022-

As head of function in the geodetic office I am next in line to the department head and I have the overall operational and scientific responsibility in the office. This includes strategic planning as well as daily task management. I oversee and contribute to the scientific collaboration with DTU Space and the Nordic Geodetic Commision. A significant part of my role is to keep up with international collaborators and stakeholders, for instance by contributing to the UN-GGRF efforts to strengthen geodesy globally or by taking part in workshops on reference frames and transformations within EUREF and EuroSDR.

Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency/Infrastructure

Geophysicist: 2016-2022

DHM

At the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency (SDFE) I was initially involved in making the of the new Danish Height Model (DHM). I joined the project in it's finishing stages and primarily worked on producing the final products for distribution such as point clouds of the LiDAR data, DTM, DSM as well as hydrological products for screening areas of flood risk. At the time, the DEM we produced was the most detailed elevation mapping of an entire country ever made.

PROJ

An internal reorganisation put my in the geodetic office of the agency, where I got my first real introduction to geodesy. Along with my colleague Thomas Knudsen I took on the challenge to modernize the transformation software that had been build in-house over the previous three or four decades. Instead of trying to rework the old software Thomas hatched a plan to migrate the Danish transformations to the PROJ software which were in more widespread use. At the time the PROJ.4 project was in a less than ideal maintenance state. Our contributions gave the project a breath of fresh air and we managed to put a new governing structure in place, where I was appointed chair of the project steering committee. Over the years the project has been completely revitalised and have gone from a somewhat simple library providing cartographic projections to being a fully fledged geodetic transformation library. The big breakthrough came after a fund-raising campaign that brought in nearly $150,000 which made it possible to implement support for the Well-Known Text standard and incorporating the EPSG database. After this landmark PROJ has increased it's adoption globally and many national geodetic authorities use PROJ as the reference implementation of their transformations. The latter is in part due to my outreach activities within the geodetic community where I have promoted the software and made the case that sharing the burden of maintaining one software package is infinitely better than each country individually developing their own.

Dynamic Reference Frame Iceland

Within the Nordic Geodetic Commision I was part of a project that investigated the feasibility of implementing a dynamic reference frame in Iceland. Iceland had an urgent need for new geodetic reference frame and within the geodetic community the idea of bringing dynamic reference frames to end-users was gaining traction. My role in the project was to research how such a frame could be implemented for GIS-users, looking into metadata standards, commonly used file formats and transformation implementation. The conclusion to the project was that a fully dynamic implementation would not be feasible and in the end a semi-dynamic, similar to what is in use in New Zealand, was adopted and implemented.

FIRE

Similar to the transformation software, the benchmark database (REFGEO) and the surrounding software were becoming difficult to maintain and develop. In 2018 a project was started to define a new database for benchmark information as well as replacing the software related to REFGEO. The new database is called "FIRE", an abbreviation of "Fikspunktsregister", the Danish word for benchmark database. I played a key role in defining the new database structure and the migration from REFGEO to FIRE. In the process I enhanced my skills in data modelling and gained familiarity with the intricasies of the the data model behind the Danish basic public data (grunddatamodel), as the data model for FIRE had to be compatible since benchmark information is one of the datasets in the public basic data.

A key challenge in creating the new data model was that the existing database had evolved over time without a clearly defined ruleset. The oldest data in the database is from the 19th century, hence a lot of the data has been digitized at some point. The database had been migrated previously as well. This resulted in many special cases and varying degrees of data quality in REFGEO. A guiding principle in the modelling of the new database was to keep data consistent, so that special cases in software could be limited in the future.

On top of the FIRE database we developed a Python package, also called "fire", which lets users interact with the database. The package is based on SQLAlchemy and all interaction with the database is done through SQLAlchemy objects. I have been the main contributor to this package. In particular my focus has been on the interaction with the database and providing a framework that abstracts most of the database interactions away from the casual contributors.

Danish Geodata Agency

Geophysicist: 2014-2016

At the Geodata Agency I was part of the Hydrographic Office, specifically the surveying unit that worked in collaboration with the Danish Navy. My role was to support the surveyors and update their software which was build in-house. An ongoing task was to improve and modernize QA-procedures for surveyors. Througout my employment I was working on a complete overhaul of the data management processes, designing a new database and the surrounding software but unfortunately the agency was relocated and the project was scrapped.

ST Development

Scientific Software Developer: 2012-2014

ST Development was a software consultant for Oxford Instruments. Primarily providing services for the electron microscope division, in particular focusing on the Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) method.

At ST Development I was tasked with modernising the Channel 5 software suite, a package written in Delphi Pascal for Windows 2000. In the process I learned to program in Pascal and got a good grasp on building graphical user interfaces. Most importantly, I learned how to familiarize myself with an older code base and what it takes to modernize it without comprimising existing functionality.

SkyTEM

Software Consultant: 2010

Part time employment during my studies. I implemented experimental algorithms devised by researchers affiliated with SkyTEM. The algorithms were potential improvements of the inversion of TEM-data, which I implemented and evaluated in Matlab.

Danish Emergency Management Agency

Conscript: 2005-2006

I did my compulsary national service at Rescue Center North Jutland in Thisted. Here I trained as a fire fighter and got qualifications in search and rescue, chemical emergencies and radio communication.