Our Team

C. Titus Brown is an assistant professor at Michigan State University in the CSE and Microbiology departments, where he works on data-driven biology

Shreyas Cholia works on science gateway, web and grid technologies for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he works to make high-performance scientific computing more transparent and accessible. He went to Rice University where he studied Computer Science and Cognitive Sciences.

Carole Goble is Professor of Computer Science in the University of Manchester, and has spent the past twenty years developing innovative computing approaches in knowledge management, distributed computing and social computing to support scientific researchers in a wide variety of areas, including Taverna, BioCatalogue, myExperiment, and SEEK. She is a partner in the UK's Software Sustainability Institute.

Marian Petre is a Professor of Computing at the Open University. She holds a Royal Society/Wolfson Research Merit Award in recognition of her research on expertise in software design. With degrees in both Psycholinguistics and Computer Science, Marian's research spans empirical studies of software development, representation and visualisation for software design, psychology of programming, human-centred computing, and computer science education.

Mark Plumbley is Director of the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary, University of London, and leads the SoundSoftware.ac.uk project. His work in audio signal analysis includes beat tracking, music transcription, source separation and object coding, using techniques such as neural networks, independent component analysis, sparse representations and Bayesian modeling.

Ethan White is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology and the Ecology Center at Utah State University. He is a recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER "Young Investigators" Award. He is a proponent of open and reproducible science and serves on the editorial boards of both PLOS ONE and PeerJ.

Aron Ahmadia works at the intersection of applied mathematics, software engineering, and application domains as diverse as adaptive optics, semiconductor lithography, and ice-sheet modeling. His focus is in the collaborative development of robust, reproducible, and scalable software tools for computational science.

Carlos Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate in Evolutionary Biology at Michigan State University, where he is studying the genetic mechanisms of speciation using artificial life. He obtained his B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Biology at the University of Central Florida.

Dhavide Aruliah is an associate professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Ontario. His research interests are in scientific computing, specifically in computational inverse problems, numerical linear algebra, and the numerical solution of PDEs.

Azalee Bostroem is a Senior Research and Instrument Analyst at the Space Telescope Science Institute. She is primarily responsible for organizing the development of the calibration pipelines of the two spectrographs on the Hubble Space Telescope (the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) to meet the scientific needs of the astronomical community. She also collaborates on a project using the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph to derive the properties of massive stars.

Erik Bray is a software engineer in the science software branch at Space Telescope Science Institute, where he works primarily on supporting Hubble and JWST science software. His software experience ranges from web development to kernel hacking, and in his "free" time he's working on an MS in Applied Physics.

Jennifer Bryan is an Associate Professor in the Statistics Department and the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She's a biostatistician specialized in genomics and takes a special interest and delight in data analysis and statistical computing.

After 13 years of slogging in the software industry trenches, Rosangela Canino-Koning returned to university to pursue a PhD in Computer Science and Evolutionary Biology at Michigan State University. In her copious spare time, she reads, hikes, travels, and hacks on open source software.

Chris Cannam is a software developer with the Sound Software project at Queen Mary, University of London. He has had extensive experience as a commercial software developer and on numerous open source applications, particularly in the music and audio fields.

Adina Chuang Howe received her PhD in Environmental Engineering. She is currently a postdoctoral research scientist at Michigan State University, where she uses skills learned from Software Carpentry to study microbial communities in the environment.

Neil Chue Hong is Director of the Software Sustainability Institute, and is based at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in community engagement and development, software sustainability, and the integration and analysis of data.

Stefano Cozzini is half split between CNR/IOM, where he coordinates all the center's HPC activities, and its small start-up company, where he tries to promote HPC to a wider audience. He enjoy teaching IT and HPC all around the world.

Steve Crouch is a software architect at the Software Sustainability Institute, and is based at the University of Southampton. He assists researchers and their communities by consulting on software that is integral to their research.

Matt Davis is a software developer at the Space Telescope Science Institute where he works on Python and C projects that support Hubble science. He also spends a bit of time spreading Python around the office. He previously worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center where he wrote Python software to support atmospheric science research.

Ross Dickson has a Ph.D. in computational chemistry, and has been back and forth between academia and the software development industry a few times over the years. Now he helps profs, post-docs, and students in Atlantic Canada solve research problems involving high-performance computers.

Jonathan Dursi is an astrophysicist with twenty years' experience in computational science. He has taught courses in computing from the desktop to supercomputers in Canada, the US, and South Africa. In 2000, as part of the US DoE ASC Flash team, he won a Gordon Bell Award, one of supercomputing's highest accolades.

Justin Ely is a Research and Instrument Analyst at the Space Telescope Science Institute where he supports the science operations of the Hubble Space Telescope. Primarily, he uses Python to monitor and improve the performance of the two on-board spectrographs, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph.

Richard Enbody is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota in 1987 and his B.A. in Mathematics at Carleton College in 1976. His primary research interest is in computer security. Together with Bill Punch he wrote The Practice of Computing Using Python with editions in Python 2 and Python 3 and a translation in Chinese.

Fernanda Foertter is a member of the HPC User Assistance Group at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Her role is to "help users run". When she's not on call, she's developing and scheduling HPC related training as the Task Lead for Training at the National Center for Computational Sciences. Prior to ORNL, she worked at an agricultural genomics company dealing with Big (Genetic) Data.

Julia Gustavsen is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in Biological Oceanography. Her thesis work focuses on the changes that take place in marine viral communities over time and space. She received her BA and BSc from the University of New Brunswick.

Richard "Tommy" Guy is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. While at Wake Forest University, he helped create Verbal Victor, an app to help children with communication difficulties.

Steven Haddock is a Research Scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and adjunct Associate Professor at U.C. Santa Cruz, studying bioluminescence and biodiversity of marine zooplankton. He co-authored Practical Computing for Biologists with Casey Dunn.

Mike Hansen is a PhD student in Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. His research interests include quantifying the complexity of software using cognitive models of programmers. He has designed and developed software professionally for almost ten years, and enjoys teaching others the skill and art of programming.

Ted Hart is a post-doc at the University of British Columbia where he studies the evolution of sociality in spiders using individual based models and evolutionary algorithms. He received his PhD from the University of Vermont and is a member of the rOpenSci development group.

Konrad Hinsen is a theoretical physicist by training who currently works on protein structure and dynamics and scientific computing at the Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire in Orléans (France) and at the Synchrotron Soleil in Saint Aubin (France). He is also a department editor for Computing in Science and Engineering.

Katy Huff is a PhD student in nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where she helped found The Hacker Within.

Paul Ivanov is a graduate student in the Vision Science program at UC Berkeley. His interests include eye tracking, GPGPU programming, and natural image statistics.

Mike Jackson has a background in human-computer interaction and is a software architect at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. He is also a consultant with the Software Sustainability Institute.

Jessica Kerr has channeled an undergraduate physics degree into a programming career. She loves computer science, especially when it intersects with math and complexity theory. Her goals include acquiring new tastes, sharing enthusiasm, and keeping two crazy-happy children alive.

W. Trevor King is a PhD student in Physics at Drexel University. He studies single-molecule protein unfolding, focusing on open source experiment control and automation using Comedi and Python. This has led to exposure to a wide range of software, and he moonlights as an evangelist for open source software in general, and Git and Python in particular.

Justin Kitzes is a postdoc in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. His research centers on the intersection of quantitative ecology and conservation biology, with a focus on developing general methods to predict spatial patterns of biodiversity in human-altered landscapes.

Bernhard Konrad is a PhD student in Mathematical Biology at the University of British Columbia. He studies early within-host events after HIV exposure and how treatment or a vaccine could prevent infection. He received his Masters at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, where he focused on functional analysis.

Karin Lagesen has a PhD in bioinformatics and has since focused on the processing of high throughput sequencing data in various forms. With a background in both computational science and molecular biology, she has taught programming and computational analysis to both master and PhD students and believes that this should be an integral part of any biologist's toolbox.

Ian Langmore is a mathematician/engineer working as a data scientist in New York City. He currently works at Johnson Research Labs and teaches an Applied Data Science class in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University.

Chris Lasher works at the interfaces of molecular biology, computer science, and software development. In 2007, he lead a weekly Software Carpentry boot camp at Virginia Tech for postdocs and graduate students. To this day, Chris continues to improve his good programming habits and extol the virtues of Python, his most beloved programming language.

Doug Latornell is a professional engineer with a background of creating and using software to solve problems in a wide range of application areas. His post-graduate research was in the fields of experimental and computational fluid mechanics (M.Sc.), and modeling and control of robotic manipulators (Ph.D.). By day he works for Nordion in Vancouver, where he helps to produce a variety of medical isotopes by proton irradiation from cyclotron accelerators. Side projects include software engineering support for a coupled biology and physics model of deep estuaries, and an operational deployment of that model that, through the winter months, calculates a daily prediction of the date of the first spring phytoplankton bloom in the Strait of Georgia.

Stephen McGough is the Research Manager for the Digital Institute at Newcastle University. His research interests lie in the areas of high performance and high throughput computing along with their implications for green computing.

Jessica McKellar is a kernel engineer living in Cambridge, MA. She is a Python Software Foundation board member and an organizer for the largest Python user group in the world. With that group she runs the Boston Python Workshops for women and their friends—an introductory programming pipeline that has brought hundreds of women into the local Python community and is being replicated in cities across the US.

Emily Jane McTavish is a PhD student at the University of Texas studying the complex evolutionary history of Texas Longhorn cattle using genomic data. In May 2013 she is starting a postdoc at University of Kansas developing tools for updating and revising the tree of life, as part of the Open Tree project.

Ian M. Mitchell is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include scientific computing, cyber-physical systems, formal verification, and reproducible research.

Jason Montojo received his Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2009. He currently works for the GeneMANIA team.

Ben Morris is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina. His research uses large datasets and ecoinformatics to answer questions about patterns in species distribution and community assembly. He also develops open source software to make ecology and biodiversity data more accessible.

Lex Nederbragt is a self-taught bioinformatician working with high-throughput DNA sequencing data at Oslo University, Norway. His speciality is the assembly of genomes from short pieces of sequence information.

Charlene Nielsen joined the University of Alberta in 2001 as the GIS Analyst for the Department of Biological Sciences. Her collaborative role involves spatial analyses and modelling, developing GIS research and education solutions for an average of 60 researchers annually, programming (automation with Python is golden!), managing the GIS labs, creating and instructing workshops and courses (including GIS databases and Python programming), and organizing UofA's GIS Day. Charlene received her MSc in Geography (with specialization in Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing) from the University of Calgary in 2001.

Aleksandra Pawlik works for the Software Sustainability Institute at the University of Manchester and is responsible for supporting scientific software communities development. She's also finishing her PhD about documentation in scientific software.

Jason Pell is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Quantitative Biology at Michigan State University who is primarily interested in tackling large next-generation DNA sequencing datasets. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Grand Valley State University.

Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at U.C. Berkeley. His work involves the development and implementation of new algorithms and tools for neuroimaging, with a special interest in functional MRI. He is also actively involved with the development of new tools for high-level scientific computing, mostly using the Python language.

Caitlyn Pickens is a graduate student at Michigan State University. She researches education techniques in the undergraduate computer science classroom—specifically, the flipped classroom and active learning.

Ariel Rokem is a post-doctoral researcher at the Stanford Psychology Department. His research focuses on the functional neuroanatomy of the human visual system. Since his time as a PhD student at UC Berkeley, he has been involved in developing open source software for neuroimaging.

Anthony Scopatz has a PhD in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and is now a post-doc in the Astrophysics Department's FLASH Center at the University of Chicago.

Jeff Shelton is a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, studying the control aspects of human motion. Following more than two decades in industry, he is interested in aligning educational methods with the evolving societal roles performed by engineers.

Joshua Ryan Smith specializes in electronic devices based on wide-bandgap semiconductor materials and in the past has done work in surface science and nanofabrication. Joshua is a native of North Carolina and received his Ph.D. in physics from North Carolina State University; he learned Python programming in graduate school and has an interest in understanding the design of experiments in terms of the practices of software development.

Sarah Supp received her Ph.D. student in Ecology from Utah State University. Her research interests lie in combining field studies, macroecological analyses and ecoinformatics to understand the dynamics that drive change at the community and ecosystem level.

Tracy Teal is a bioinformatics specialist at Michigan State University, having completed an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biological Informatics. She has developed open-source tools for metagenomics analysis and, as a member of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, studied the effects of land use change on microbial communities and greenhouse gas flux.

After working as a Python software engineer, Nelle Varoquaux returned to university in 2011 to pursue an applied mathematics degree, specializing in machine learning. She is now using her skills to solve biological problems, such as reconstructing the 3D architecture of the genome.

Alex Viana is a Research and Instrument Analyst at the Space Telescope Science Institute where he supports the operations of the Hubble Space Telescope. Primarily working in Python and SQL he has contributed to a wide range of scientific and educational projects at STScI.

Ben Waugh writes and maintains software, teaches programming and a bit of physics, manages computer systems and drinks lots of coffee in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London, mostly in the High-Energy Physics Group.

Lynne Williams works at the Rotman-Baycrest Research Institute, where she studies the cognitive neuroscience of language development over the lifespan and develops statistical techniques to analyze large multivariate data sets. Her most recent work is concerned with pattern classifiers in brain imaging and age-associated patterns of variability in brain activation.

Greg Wilson started the Software Carpentry project in 1998. He has been a professional software developer, an author, and a university professor. Greg received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1993.

Paul Wilson is an Associate Professor at the U. Wisconsin-Madison where he teaches nuclear engineering. His research group, CNERG, delivers new capability for the simulation of nuclear systems. The Hacker Within was born from his research group as he tried to impart Software Carpentry skills upon his graduate students.

Jorge Aranda obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Victoria, where he studies coordination and communication in software teams.

Amy Brown handles communication and scheduling for Software Carpentry. In her other life, she's a freelance editor and self-publishing consultant, raises two girls, and sings as often as possible.

Jon Pipitone completed his MSc in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 2010. He has been active since then in a variety of scientific, environmental, and social justice causes.

David Wolever is a software engineer from Toronto. He's passionate about Python, version control, and motorcycles. He works for Luminautics, directs PyCon Canada, and freelances in whatever time he has left.