SciPy2016 - Annual SciPy Conference

Fernando Pérez is an assistant professor in Statistics at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Scientist in the Department of Data Science and Technology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After completing a PhD in particle physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, his postdoctoral research in applied mathematics centered on the development of fast algorithms for the solution of partial differential equations in multiple dimensions.  Today, his research focuses on creating tools for modern computational research and data science across domain disciplines, with an emphasis on high-level languages, interactive and literate computing, and reproducible research.  He created IPython while a graduate student in 2001 and co-founded its successor, Project Jupyter. The Jupyter team collaborates openly to create the next generation of tools for human-driven computational exploration, data analysis, scientific insight and education.

He is a National Academy of Science Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow and a Senior Fellow and founding co-investigator of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.  He is a co-founder of the NumFOCUS Foundation, and a member of the Python Software Foundation. He is the recipient of the 2012 Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation.

Stéfan van der Walt is a researcher at BIDS. He is the founder of scikit-image and co-author of Elegant SciPy.  Stéfan has been developing scientific open source software for more than a decade, focusing mainly on Python packages such as NumPy & SciPy. Outside work, he enjoys traveling, running, and the great outdoors.

Nathaniel Smith was a computational fellow at BIDS, where he divided his time between computationally informed research on human cognition (esp. language processing) and on building better computational tools for researchers in general.

Josh Bloom an astronomy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches high-energy astrophysics, Python bootcamps, and a graduate-level class on Python for data-driven science. He has published more than 250 refereed articles, largely on time-domain transients events and telescope/insight automation. Expressed in his research is output of a collaborative effort between talented astronomers, statisticians, and computer scientists (ranging from students to peers) at the nexus of physics, scalable computation, and machine learning.  His book on gamma-ray bursts was published in 2011, as part of the "Frontiers in Physics" series by Princeton University Press. He has been awarded the Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society, and he is a former Sloan Fellow, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society, and Hertz Foundation Fellow. He holds a PhD from Caltech and degrees from Harvard and Cambridge University. Recently, he has working as co-PI of the Moore-Sloan Data Science Initiative at UC Berkeley and an elected member of the management oversight body of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).