RSS

Northland alum working at NASA featured speaker in Alumni Career Speaker series

February 7, 2013

Shannon Franks is a featured speaker in the Alumni Career Speaker series beginning next week at Northland College. Franks is a senior scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Each year, Northland brings distinguished alumni back to campus to provide insights to current students about careers after college.

On Thursday, Northland College will feature a discussion with Northland alumnus Shannon Franks at 4:30 p.m. in the Craig A. Ponzio Campus Center on campus. Franks works at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Md. He focuses on Earth observation and obtains images from satellites for analysis through remote sensing techniques.

"On a daily basis, I am applying principles of physics and mathematics to analyze information from satellite imagery," Franks said in a 2011 article for Physics World. "One thing you quickly learn in this field is that while remotely sensed Earth imagery is visually impressive, behind every pretty picture there is information in the form of pixel values, and these have to be interpreted. For example, the data are often a stream of values from zero to 255...so I have to be able to interpret how the changes in those values relate to changes in Earth's land cover."

A car accident during Franks' first year at Northland College left him paralyzed. Franks eventually returned to Northland and shifted his focus from solely studying environmental science, incorporating physics into his studies. A series of summer internships resulted in him working for the GSFC's Landsat Project Science Office. Franks later obtained a master's degree in geography from the University of Maryland, which led to the position he has held at NASA for the last nine years.