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Program Organizing Committee (POC)

Kathleen Labrie

Kathleen Labrie, Chair (Gemini) kathleen.labrie@noirlab.edu

Kathleen is an Observatory Scientist at Gemini Observatory. She has been involved with the development of the Gemini data reduction software since she joined Gemini in 2003. Her involvement has been at all level, from developer, to manager, and also as a user through her personal astronomical research endeavours.

Xiuqin Wu

Xiuqin Wu Deputy chair (IPAC) xiuqin@ipac.caltech.edu

Xiuqin Wu is working at IPAC, Caltech. She is the task lead for NED, the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database. Prior to joining NED, Xiuqin was task lead for the Science User Interface and Tools (SUIT) team of Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), led the Uplink team for Spitzer Science Center, and was the lead for user interface group in the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at IPAC Caltech.

Christophe Arviset

Christophe Arviset (ESA-ESAC) Christophe.Arviset@esa.int

Christophe Arviset is the Head of the Data Science and Archives Division, within the Science and Operations Department of ESA’s Directorate of Science at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Spain, close to Madrid. This includes the ESAC Science Data Centre, hosting data archives of more than 20 ESA space science missions, various data science activities in this context, as well as responsibility of technical IT infrastructure and services for the Directorate. He has been playing an active part of international data alliances (International Virtual Observatory Alliance, International Planetary Data Alliance and International Heliophysics Data Environment Alliance) since their creation. He had been chairing the IVOA over 2014-2016 and the IPDA over 2019-2021. Initially Computer Science engineer by training, he has developed more than 25 years of experience in science operations with special focus on science data management, data archives, long term data preservation in the context of international collaboration.

Pascal Ballester

Pascal Ballester (ESO) pballest@eso.org

Pascal Ballester is Head of the Science Operations Software Department at the European Southern Observatory. He joined ESO in 1990, to integrate the Image Processing Group for the development of instrument-related software in MIDAS. He coordinated several projects for the Very Large Telescope, including data reduction software for the high-resolution spectrograph UVES of the Very Large Telescope, the ESO Exposure Time Calculators, and Data Flow System for the VLT Interferometer. As of 2007, he led the ESO Pipeline Systems Department, responsible for the development of data reduction software and observation preparation models for the VLT and ALMA facilities. Since 2014, he is Head of the Science Operations Software Department, providing software development and engineering support to the ESO Programmes, mainly Paranal Instrumentation, VLT and ALMA science operations, and ELT programme.

Sébastien Derrière

Sébastien Derrière (CDS/France) sebastien.derriere@astro.unistra.fr

Sébastien Derriere is an astronomer at CDS (Observatoire astronomique de Strasbourg). He has been working on Virtual Observatory projects for many years, with a special interest in standardization of metadata and semantics (Unified Content Descriptors, Units, vocabularies and ontologies). He is also working on catalogue cross-matching, and the development of astronomical portals (for the CDS and in the ASTRODEEP project). Sébastien is also in charge of communication at the Strasbourg observatory, and is spending a significant fraction of his time on user support and education and public outreach activities.

Kimberly DuPrie

Kimberly DuPrie (STScI) kduprie@stsci.edu

Kimberly is a Principal Software Engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute where the focus of her work is the deep archive for multiple missions including HST, Kepler, TESS and JWST. She is also the associate editor of the Astrophysics Source Code Library. Prior to STScI she worked in the financial industry in Tokyo and New York, and at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where she helped develop the Chandra archive.

Mike Fitzpatrick

Mike Fitzpatrick - POC Exec (NOAO) mike.fitzpatrick@noirlab.edu

Mike is a Principal Software Systems Engineer at NOAO, beginning his career with the IRAF Project in 1988. Since then, he has been involved in a wide range of observatory projects involving data analysis, acquisition and transport, Virtual Observatory application development and ongoing support for the IRAF system. He is currently the Lead Developer and System Architect for the NOAO Data Lab project.

Benjamin Hugo

Benjamin Hugo (SARAO) bhugo@sarao.ac.za

Benjamin Hugo is a Software Developer with the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) in Cape Town South Africa. After joining SARAO in 2016 he was involved in telescope commissioning and operations of the 64-dish MeerKAT radio interferometer. His software interests include developing tooling in radio imaging, calibration, simulations and pipelining in support of science operations. His scientific interests are galaxy clusters, and radio polarimetry characterization and ionospheric research. He is actively involved in developing tooling for the Open Source Transient Array Radio Telescope (TART) project, being developed as a low-cost platform for human capacity development.

Ranpal Gill

Ranpal Gill (AURA/Rubin Observatory)rgill@lsst.org

Ranpal is the Head of Communications Office for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory where she leads the Communication Team efforts, assists the Director's Office with project-wide coordination, communication and reporting tasks. She holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science, has an MBA, is a Prince2 registered practitioner and a certified Project Management Professional (PMP). Ranpal has over 30 years of experience and prior to joining Rubin in March of 2017 Ranpal worked on Gaia, BepiColombo, Rosetta, Herschel and Planck missions at the European Space Agency.

Stephen Gwyn

Stephen Gwyn (CADC) gwyn.cadc@gmail.com

Stephen works as a data specialist at the Canadian Astronomy Data Center. He has developed MegaPipe a pipeline to handle data from MegaCam on CFHT and WIRwolf for data from WIRcam, also on CFHT. He also designed the Solar System Object Image Search service at the CADC.

 Alice Jacques

Alice Jacques (NOIRLab) alice.jacques@noirlab.edu

Alice Jacques is a Data Analyst in the Astro Data Lab at NOIRLab, Tucson, AZ, USA. She joined the Astro Data Lab team as a Data Analyst in 2020 after completing her Master's degree in Physics from the University of Louisville. She has expertise in extragalactic astronomy research and in Python programming. Alice is currently one of the lead analysts in charge of ingesting new data sets into Data Lab and has ingested surveys such as DES DR2, LSST SIM DR2, SkyMapper DR2, SPLUS DR2, and VHS DR5. Another area of specialty is the Data Lab cross-matching capabilities, including the creation and maintenance of cross-matched tables with core reference datasets to enhance the scientific value of the Data Lab data holdings. She brings a combination of scientific, technical, and information synthesis skills.

 Brian Kent

Brian Kent (NRAO) bkent@nrao.edu

Brian R. Kent is the Director of Science Communications with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia and is a scientist at the NRAO. His publications and studies in astrophysics and computing include scientific visualizations of a variety of theoretical and observational phenomena. He is interested in visualizing data for scientific analysis as well as reaching a broad audience with the amazing visuals that modern 3D graphics can provide.

Michael Kramer

Michael Kramer (Mpifr Bonn )michael@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de

Michael Kramer is director at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie (MPIfR) and Professor for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. His research focusses on fundamental physics using radio astronomy, especially on tests of gravity, neutron stars and black holes, and the development of new radio facilities. He co-leads a task area in the German PUNCH4NFDI consortium as part of the The National Research Data Infrastructure concentrating on data intensive astronomy and co-founder of the society for data-intensive radio astronomy (VdR).

Alessio Magro

Alessio Magro (U.Malta)alessio.magro@um.edu.mt

Alessio Magro is a researcher Insitute of Space Sciences and Astronomy at the University of Malta, for which he is currently the director. For over 10 years he has been working on the design, construction and commissioning of various radio interferometers, including various pathfinders to SKA-Low and the Northern Cross, among others. He is also involved in the OS-SHE unit of the Euclid space telecsope. His focus is on high-speed, real-time signal processing processing using GPUs and other accelerators.

Bruno Merin

Bruno Merin (ESA-ESAC)Bruno.merin@esa.int

Bruno Merin is the head of the ESAC Science Data Centre where the European Space Agency hosts, curates and distributes science data of all its Astronomy, Heliophysics, Planetary and Human and Robotic Exploration missions. He used to work as data processing scientist in the infrared space observatory Herschel. Bruno is also an astronomer with experience in multi-wavelength analysis of nearby star-forming regions and circumstellar disks around young stars using data from ground- and space-based telescopes. He was involved in the development of the ESASky portal and of all the other science data archives from ESA astronomy missions.

Jessica Mink

Jessica Mink (SAO)

jmink@cfa.harvard.edu

Jessica works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at SAO's Telescope Data Center, writing and using data reduction, analysis, and archiving software for spectra of stars and galaxies taken with several spectrographs on our ground-based telescopes. She has written the IRAF RVSAO radial velocity analysis package and the widely-used WCSTools package which connects pixel and sky positions of digital images of the sky, uses source catalogs, and manipulates FITS images.

Fabio Pasian

Fabio Pasian (INAF) fabio.pasian@inaf.it  

Fabio is a senior scientist associated to INAF-OATS. In his career he led, mostly in the framework of international projects (e.g. LBT, EU/Horizon 2020 projects, Hubble, Planck, Euclid, IVOA), activities devoted to the development of computer applications for astrophysics (data processing and archiving, distributed computing, ground segment of space missions and the astronomical Virtual Observatory). Currently he is Editor-in-Chief for Elsevier's Astronomy and Computing journal.

 Rob Seaman

Rob Seaman (U.Arizona) rseaman@arizona.edu

Rob Seaman is the Data Engineer and a Co-investigator for the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Using multiple survey and follow-up telescopes in Arizona and Australia, CSS has discovered nearly half of all near-Earth asteroids, including three impactors and two mini-moons. Rob serves as chair of the IAU Time Domain working group and co-chairs the SPIE Observatory Operations conference. His diverse interests include archiving, rapid transient response, data compression (FPACK), and timekeeping in astronomy.

 Yuji Shirasaki

Yuji Shirasaki (NAOJ) yuji.shirasaki@nao.ac.jp

Yuji Shirasaki is an observational astrophysicist at NAOJ. He received his PhD degree in 1997 for study of chemical composition of primary cosmic ray. After that he was involved in a GRB mission HETE-2, where he worked for development of the WXM and GRB autonomous localization system at RIKEN. In 2002 he moved to NAOJ and has been involved in Japanese VO (JVO) project, where he developed many kinds of software system: distributed computing for Subaru Suprime-Cam, JVO portal, ALMA FITS archive, distributed database system for Gaia, and so on. His current research interest is in statistical analysis of Subaru HSC survey data for understanding evolution of SMBH.

Mark Taylor

Mark Taylor (University of Bristol) m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk

Mark's research was originally in computational condensed-matter physics, but since late last century he has been working as a software engineer in astronomy. He worked initially on data reduction software for the UK's Starlink project, and subsequently in and out of various software projects on standards and implementations concerning data exchange and tabular data, mostly while based at the University of Bristol. He has a long involvement with the Virtual Observatory and has developed and continues to work on the TOPCAT application for manipulating tables.

Peter Teuben

Peter Teuben (U.Maryland) teuben@astro.umd.edu

Peter is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Maryland. For over 30 years he has been working on radio interferometry and image analysis software and pipelines with WSRT, BIMA, CARMA, ALMA, GBT, and LMT to name a few (GIPSY, MIRIAD, CASA, LMTOY). He is also interested in simulation software, and is the maintainer of the NEMO Stellar Dynamics toolbox. More recently is has become involved in the ASCL, and now that incoming students do not know any Unix, the teaching of scientific computing using Unix. He also has a long standing involvement in ASCL, helping astronomers find codes and vice versa.

James Tocknell

James Tocknell (AAO)james.tocknell@mq.edu.au

James Tocknell is a software developer/data scientist/dev ops/general all rounder in the RDS team at AAO which is now part of Macquarie University. He primarily works on the Data Central science platform, but has also worked on more unusual projects such as a database for tracking fruit flies, and mobile web apps for managing fieldwork for archaeology, ecology and geoscience.

He is also finishing up his PhD on Jets from Protoplanetary Discs, having previously worked on jets from planetary nebulae and flaring from the galactic centre.

Stefan Wagner

Stefan Wagner (Heidelberg) swagner@lsw.uni-heidelberg.de

Stefan Wagner is at the Observatory of Heidelberg University, Germany. He is also director of the HESS observatory and spokesperson of the HESS collaboration. He has been active in multifrequency research in the last 30 years, working in all frequency bands from radio to gamma-ray astronomy. He is also engaged in research data management across natural sciences (PUNCH4NFDI). As a founding member of the new German center for astrophysics and the VdR, a society for data-intensive radio astronomy, he supports work on big data management in astrophysics.

Kai Polsterer

Kai Polsterer (HITS gGmbH)

Kai Polsterer Kai.Polsterer@h-its.org

Kristian Zarb Adami

Kristian Zarb Adami (Malta/Oxford) kris.za@gmail.com

Kristian Zarb Adami kris.za@gmail.com

POC Internal Pages

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