Mr. Naess has been a Research Associate with the Institute for the Environment (formerly the Carolina Environmental Program) since 2001. Mr. Naess is a GIS specialist, comfortable using ESRI products, as well as open-source GIS applications like QGIS and PostGIS. Mr. Naess contributes regularly on funded research projects with GIS needs, creating spatial input data for various modeling applications and producing map packages and GIS maps as deliverables on a number of work assignments as well as leading visualization and QA analyses of model outputs. Mr. Naess' research focuses on the impact of air quality on human health, and has led research focused on the impacts of transportation on human health, prepared the 2023 National Emissions Inventory for the aviation sector, and is currently interested in the emissions and impact of Sargassum inundation events on Caribbean communities. Mr. Naess is an experienced programmer in Python, ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), Javascript, HTML, and CSS, and he has experience designing and managing relational databases like PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MySQL. Mr. Naess has lecturer appointments with the Environment, Ecology, and Energy Program and SILS at UNC and teaches undergraduate environment science courses, including leading a Study Abroad program focused on coral reef ecology and management. Mr. Naess co-founded and manages the EcoStudio at UNC which pairs undergraduate students with sustainability-related internships.