Kyle Westfall
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.
Session
Motivated by recommendations from the Astro2020 Decadal Survey, developers across many software projects have met over the past year to discuss current and future needs for general-purpose spectroscopic data reduction and analysis tools. Specifically for data reduction software, the discussion has centered on the development of more general-purpose tools (e.g., the AstroPy-affiliated packages specutils and specreduce) to enable users to more easily build pipelines for unsupported and newly commissioned instruments. This is needed to address the fact that most available packages focus on specific instruments or surveys.
In this BoF, we will briefly review the recommendations from Astro2020, the discussions from follow-up meetings, and ongoing development efforts stemming from these discussions. We will then hold an open discussion to collect information about parallel efforts and potential new collaborations that can be formed to address specific, timely needs of the community.