Slesa Adhikari
Computer Scientist building earth-observation platforms. NASA Comet Award. Founder, Saano Labs.
Slesa after hours
Comics, paintings, hands-on makes. Interiors and home automation. Houseplant care, propagation, native-plant gardening. The visual side of the same brain.
Earth science, at scale.
Cloud-native platforms for cataloging, ingesting, and visualizing huge geospatial datasets — for NASA, and now for Saano Labs.
I lead engineering on public NASA-funded platforms — the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center and VEDA. The role runs end-to-end: shaping roadmap with NASA stakeholders, translating mission goals into technical scope, running the day-to-day operations, facilitating science-team workshops, and steering architectural decisions across the stack.
In the code itself: front-end visualization, backend APIs and microservices, AWS data pipelines, and the IaC and CI/CD that ties it together — making Earth observation data discoverable and analyzable.
Recognized by NASA Comet (2023) and Marshall Innovation Team Awards (2021).
With my hands, with ink, with dirt.
Comics, sketches, houseplants, native-plant gardens — the work that doesn't get billed.
I draw short-form comics under @saanostory, fuss over a growing houseplant collection on weekends, and slowly convert a Huntsville lawn into a southeast-US native-plant garden.
The visual sense in the engineering work — how a map should breathe, how a chart’s typography lands — comes from this side. They’re the same brain.
Three pieces I'm proud of.
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Public NASA platform for cataloging and visualizing U.S. greenhouse gas datasets across satellite, airborne, and in-situ sources.
Lead engineer
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VEDA · NASA EarthData
2022→Open-source visualization, exploration, and data analysis platform for NASA earth science.
Platform engineer
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pyQuARC
2020→2022Open-source Python tool for validating Earth science metadata records in NASA's Common Metadata Repository (CMR).
Lead engineer
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Saano Labs
2025→Subcontracting to build data systems for the IEEE GRSS community — cataloging, ingestion, and analytics on large-scale geospatial datasets.
Founder · CEO
Things that came out of evenings.
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digital short-form comics about everyday observations.
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turning a plain IKEA cabinet into a tiny indoor greenhouse
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Native-plant patch · zone 8b
Slowly converting a Huntsville lawn into a southeast US native-plant garden. Emphasis on pollinator support.
The full CV.
Field notes & squigglies.
Documentation of the personal projects.
Ongoing on the squiggly lines blog →. It’s a digital garden where I write up makes, sketches, plant notes, and the occasional tutorial. I treat each entry like a small interactive piece — custom layouts, scrolly scenes, hand-drawn touches.