Pierre Raybaut is a long-term advocate of Python in a scientific context, renowned as the creator of Spyder, the Scientific Python IDE, and other pivotal projects like Python(x,y) and WinPython. These tools have been instrumental in making Python a leading language for scientific computing.

Pierre's academic journey began with an engineer's degree from the Institut d’Optique Graduate School, specializing in laser physics. He further advanced his expertise by earning a PhD in optics and photonics from Université Paris-Saclay, where he developed software for simulating regenerative amplification in ultra-short pulse lasers.

Professionally, Pierre has held diverse and impactful roles. He served as a research engineer at THALES Avionics, a principal software developer at CEA (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission), and managed the Laser MégaJoule timing and fiducial system project. Eventually, he became the Head of a Research Laboratory at CEA before transitioning to Codra, an industrial software company, where he currently holds the position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

Beyond his work on Spyder, Pierre is deeply involved in the open-source software community. He has created tools such as guidata, PlotPy, PlotPyStack and DataLab, and has contributed to numerous other projects.