William Smith is an educator and researcher with expertise in ecosystem ecology, remote sensing, the carbon and water cycle, and high performance computing. He is a new faculty member in the process of hiring two postdoctoral researchers and two-three graduate students to begin in Fall 2017. He is also planning to establish a continuous rotation of two-three undergraduates into is lab group. Smith’s work is anchored by the processing, interpretation, analysis, and synthesis of aircraft and satellite remote sensing data. Remote sensing data commonly used by researchers in the Smith lab are derived from Earth Observing platforms such as LandSat, MODIS, AMSR-E, OCO-2, SMAP, NEON, etc. Other complimentary data commonly used in the Smith lab include large-scale networks of eddy flux tower measurement e.g. Fluxnet) vegetation dynamics e.g. LTER) ground and camera based phenometrics e.g. NPN) and networks of tree-ring measurements e.g. ITRDB) Graduate students in the Smith lab are trained in high performance computing and big-data science utilizing local Linux clusters, Cyverse computing resources, and cloud-based computing resources. Graduate students are also trained in code management best practices using Github for version control and as a public code repository for the lab. Smith is also designing a course titled ‘Ecological Climatology’ that he will begin teaching to undergraduate and graduate students as a part of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Degree Program GIDP) in spatial analysis and remote sensing to begin Fall 2017.