Alec is Head of Software Engineering at Asteroid Institute. He brings over a decade of experience building software and leading engineering teams at both startups and Fortune 100 companies. Before joining Asteroid Institute, Alec held the roles of CTO, VP of Engineering and Principal Engineer.

Alec also has a long history contributing to open source projects, spending time as an early core contributor of Saltstack and maintaining critical packages on PyPI with millions of downloads. Although not a security engineer by trade, he discovered CVE-2020-5252 which exposes a vulnerability in package scanning tools Snyk, safety, and npm audit.

Alec received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science & Physics from Marlboro College, where he wrote software for analyzing the performance of wind turbines. He lives on his homestead in southern Vermont.

Postdoctoral researcher for the SKA

IPAC Chief Engineer & Senior Scientist. Recent projects in time-domain and alerting (involving large volumes of data and short deadlines).

Brigitta is a developer at Caltech/IPAC-IRSA. She works on the NASA Astrophysics Science Platform (Fornax), and maintains various open source libraries in the astronomy, Scientific Python and Jupyter ecosystems including pyVO, astroquery, astropy, and numpy-tutorials.

https://github.com/bsipocz

UI Tools Team Lead
AI/ML Tech Lead
at Caltech/IPAC

• JAE Intro ICU Scholar - Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA).
• MSc. Astrophysics, University of La Laguna (ULL) in agreement with the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC). (Carolina Foundation Scholar)
• MEng. Electronic Science and Technology, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA - Beihang) (Chinese Scholarship Council Scholar).
• National Astronomy Education Coordinator (NAEC) for Bolivia - Office of Astronomy for Education (OAE) / International Astronomical Union (IAU)
• Projects in charge: Bolivian Virtual Observatory (BVO), Astro3DBol - Educational kits.

Head of the Data Processing and Archiving Department (DPAD) of the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA), in Teruel (Spain).

I did my PhD in Helio- and Asteroseismology at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Tenerife (Spain). Since 2013 I'm a researcher at CEFCA. Besides my main duty now, managing the DPAD, I'm currently focused in studying the physics of the RR Lyrae stars making use of the data from the multi-filter sky surveys conducted at the Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre.

Bringing the same amount of rigor to the data processing as we have in the data analysis.

Janet Evans is the Software Development Manager at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. She manages the Chandra X-ray Center Data System Software (CXCDS) group, with overall responsibility for the end-to-end software for Chandra's science mission operations. In addition, Janet has been involved in the IVOA for many years and is currently leading the Protocol Transitioning Tiger team (P3T) and working to include a High Energy Interest group to the IVOA.

Dr. Jeffrey C. Smith began his academic passion in the field of Accelerator Physics. After building a cyclotron, a small particle accelerator, as an undergraduate at Knox College, Jeff matriculated at Cornell University furthering his passion for high energy particle accelerators and uncovering the inner workings of fundamental particles & the universe. His Ph.D. thesis was on the design of the International Linear Collider (ILC), a 22 mile-long electron-positron accelerator that will complement the discoveries being made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. After Cornell, Jeff joined the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University to continue his work on the ILC and also to develop upgrade hardware for the LHC. After a successful career looking into the tiniest of inner-spaces Jeff decided to look up to the stars. Dr. Smith switched fields and began developing data processing and planet detection algorithms for the Kepler and TESS Missions. These missions combined have discovered thousands of extrasolar planets. With the Kepler and TESS planet detection pipelines now quite mature, Dr. Smith has diversified his research interests. Among other projects, he is centrally involved in a project funded by NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office to develop an automated pipeline to identify bolides (exploding meteors) in weather satellite data. The goal is to create a rich data set to inform the planetary defense community of the risks associated with large asteroidal impacts.

I am a radio astronomer and research software engineer currently working at Leiden Observatory and in the final year of my PhD. I have a background in various fields and industries and have obtained international experience by studying, working, and living in five different countries (currently the Netherlands). My professional experience varies from developing data-driven tools and software for commercial companies to smashing around terabytes of data on high-performance supercomputers to learn something about the universe.

Data processing And Preservation Coordinator and Data Model Working Group chair for CTAO (Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory). I'm also a staff astrophysicist at CEA Paris-Saclay Astrophysics Department.

I'm an astrophysicist that has worked for over 20 years on the detection of very-high-energy gamma rays, from hardware to software, and on the physics of objects that emit such radiation in the universe. I'm particularly interested in galactic particle accelerators and the origin of cosmic rays.

We are team "Stellar Forge", developing AI-driven tools for researchers to bring out best of both worlds astronomical database and AI.

Team Members:
Pavlos Protopapas, IACS @Harvard, MA, US
Karthik Mahesh Rathod, M.Tech. @JNTUK, India
Ashish Kumar, (B.Tech.+M.Tech.) @IIT Kharagpur, India
Swarnava Bhattacharjee, M.S. @LJMU, UK

Keith has had many years of experience developing astronomical software, mainly for instrument control and data reduction. Having worked originally at UCL and then at Caltech, he has spent most of his career at the Australian Astronomical Observatory. He is particularly interested in the use of hardware simulation in instrument control software projects, and in ways of displaying astronomical data. Having nominally retired from AAO in 2016, he continues to work on a freelance basis, mostly on instrument control software.

Kevin Vinsen is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at the University of Western Australia (UWA). His work focuses on data-intensive astronomy, with an emphasis on developing machine learning methods for analysing large astronomical datasets.
Vinsen's research interests include:

1) Applying machine learning to process astronomical data
2) Exploring methods in data-intensive astronomy
3) Modelling complex astrophysical systems
4) Translating astronomical technologies into industry applications

His current work contributes to preparations for next-generation radio telescopes, including the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Vinsen collaborates with international research teams and participates in global conferences, bringing an interdisciplinary approach that connects astronomy, computer science, and industry.

Kyle Westfall is a professional astronomer with extensive experience developing software for the analysis and processing of astronomical data. He obtained a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009, and he was then funded by an NSF International Research Fellowship taken at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands until 2014. Afterward, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, UK, before becoming a Project Scientist with the University of California Observatories (UCO), located on the UCSC campus, in 2016. He is a lead developer of the PypeIt software package, and he also leads multiple instrumentation and development projects for UCO.

Ludwig has been with the MeerKAT radio telescope since the early days, focussing on software for calibration, imaging, coordinates and data access. His background is electronic engineering and statistics. He is also a relapsed machine learner.

Matthew Whiting is a Team Leader in ATNF Science at CSIRO Space & Astronomy, and the head of Data Operations for CSIRO's ASKAP radio telescope. He leads the development and operations of the high-performance processing pipelines for ASKAP that run at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.

Matthew has extensive experience in both astronomy and software development, having been part of the ASKAPsoft development team for the life of ASKAP. He is the sole developer of the Duchamp source-finder, which has been adapted to form the Selavy source-finder used in ASKAPsoft, and has expertise in developing and running highly-parallel software in supercomputing environments.

Matthew has a strong background in astronomical research - he is a member of several ASKAP survey science teams, with particular interests in quasars, AGN, and absorption-line studies, and also has a background in observational astronomy in the optical and infrared.

Neven is a research scientist at the University of Washington / Rubin Observatory focused on developing scalable tools and methods to analyze time-domain data from large surveys. His current research involves building software, including contributions to LSDB and HATS, which support cross-matching and large-scale analytics across datasets from sources like the Rubin Observatory. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich and worked previously at Princeton University, developing a data reduction pipeline for Prime Focus Spectrograph at Subaru Observatory.

Hi! I am a postdoctoral researcher based at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen. My work extends from data reduction and quality control of astronomical data - e.g. IFS (KOALA, WEAVE) and imaging (EXT-Euclid) data-, to the study of the stellar content of galaxies, and the inference of their star formation histories. I'm a passionate of python and the development of pipelines for the analysis of astronomical data.

Roger Deane is a Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria. He completed his doctorate in 2012 at the University of Oxford before returning home to South Africa to carry out postdoctoral research at Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town. In 2018, he moved to the University of Pretoria where he established the Radio Astronomy Research Group. He now holds the DSI/NRF SKA Chair in Radio Astronomy at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he serves as Director of the Wits Centre for Astrophysics. His research interests are focused on the cosmic evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes, using the power of next-generation radio telescopes such as South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array, and Very Long Baseline Interferometers, like the Event Horizon Telescope.

I am a PhD Candidate in National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC). My research interests mainly include time-domain astronomy, machine learning and foundation model in astronomy.

I am task lead for NED, Caltech/IPAC.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in College of Intelligence and Computing at Tianjin University, advised by Prof. Ce Yu, and I am currently doing joint training in the astronomy major of University of Munich, advised by Prof. Daniel Gruen. My research lies at the intersection of computer science and astronomical observation problems– with a special focus on building intelligent and efficient scheduling method of distributed telescope array for optical time-domain observations. My research interests include resource allocation and optimization, astronomical informatics, artificial intelligence, and high performance computing.