Timeline

Jake Vanderplas is an NSF Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, working jointly between the Astronomy department’s Survey Science Group, and the Computer Science department’s Database Research Group. He received his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 2012 for work in the areas of Cosmology, Weak Gravitational Lensing, and the application of automated machine learning and data mining approaches to large astronomical datasets in various contexts. This work led him to co-author an upcoming book, ‘Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy’ to be published in late 2013. Along with his research interests, Jake is an active user, developer, proponent, and teacher of the Python language for open, reproducible science, and will argue vehemently with anyone who says R is better. Flyer

Dr. Marcus D. Hanwell is a Technical Leader at Kitware, where he leads the Open Chemistry project and play a critical role in developing new workflows in Git, performing Gerrit code review, and contributing to next generation build systems in the VTK, ITK, and Titan projects. Dr. Hanwell is the Principal Investigator on the Open Chemistry project, which focuses on developing open-source tools to for chemistry, bioinformatics, and materials science research. He was inspired to pursue the development of computational chemistry tools while working on his experimental/computational Physics PhD and postdoctoral studies, when he realized how outdated and cumbersome current tools are for handing the scale of data required by chemists. In his spare time, Dr. Hanwell is an active member of the KDE open-source communities, and of the KDE e.V. He is one of the core developers of Avogadro, an open-source, 3D, cross-platform molecular visualization and editing application/library; this work was featured by Trolltech as an instance of “Qt in Use.” Dr. Hanwell has also won a Blue Obelisk award for his work in Open Chemistry, and continues to develop and promote open approaches in chemistry and related scientific fields. Flyer

Valerio Pascucci is the funding Director, Center for Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization (CEDMAV), recently established as a permanent organization at the University of Utah in collaboration with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Valerio is also an Associate Director, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, a Professor, School of Computing, University of Utah, and a Laboratory Fellow, of PNNL. Before joining the University of Utah, Valerio was the Data Analysis Group Leader of the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Davis. Valerio’s research interests include Big Data management and analytics, progressive multi-resolution techniques in scientific visualization, discrete topology, geometric compression, computer graphics, computational geometry, geometric programming, and solid modeling. Valerio is the coauthor of more than one hundred refereed journal and conference papers and has been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Flyer

Juliana Freire is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. She also holds an appointment in the Courant Institute for Mathematical Science. Before, she was an Associate Professor at the School of Computing, University of Utah; an Assistant Professor at OGI/OHSU; and a member of technical staff at the Database Systems Research Department at Bell Laboratories (Lucent Technologies). Her recent research has focused on Web-scale data integration, big-data analysis and visualization, and provenance management. Professor Freire is an active member of the database and Web research communities. She has co-authored over 130 technical papers, holds 8 U.S. patents, has chaired or co-chaired several workshops and conferences, and has participated as a program committee member in over 60 events. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER and an IBM Faculty award. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Amazon, Microsoft Research, Yahoo!, IBM, and the University of Utah. Flyer