I'm a software engineer and urbanist building open-source, cloud-native geospatial tools. My work focuses on using open data and new geospatial tech to help cities manage climate risks, especially in the Global South.
I'm a Public-Interest Data Infrastructure Fellow at Radiant Earth, and I co-teach "Geospatial Machine Learning in Remote Sensing" at the University of Pennsylvania.
Recent work:
- Technical lead for Portolan, a standard for sharing geospatial data as cloud-native files on object storage, plus the tools that make it real. No servers, no databases.
- Core maintainer of geoparquet-io, fast I/O and transformation tools for GeoParquet, on PyPI.
- As a 2025 Fulbright fellow in Argentina, I built four pilot projects with municipalities on flood, wildfire, extreme heat, and informal settlements. One of them, Barrios Visibles, found roughly 3 million people missing from Argentina's official settlement data.
- Founded Clean & Green Philly, an open-source nonprofit platform for data-driven interventions in vacant properties in Philadelphia.
For more, see my resume, projects, or talks.
Get in touch: nlebovits