Adrian Price-whelan
Research Scientist at Simons Foundation
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAdrian Price-whelan is a research scientist and software-oriented leader with 14 years of experience applying robust statistical and computational methods to large stellar surveys to map the Milky Way’s structure, dynamics, and dark matter. Based at the Simons Foundation’s Center for Computational Astrophysics, he leads the Nearby Universe and Milky Way group and shapes national data and software infrastructure as Assistant Director of Scientific Software. He is a core Astropy developer and prolific open-source contributor, improving tools from visualization (glue, corner.py) to survey-focused data prep (LSSTC-DSFP) and tutorials that lower the barrier for community contribution. Known for squeezing signal from low S/N data, he combines rigorous hierarchical modeling with practical engineering—packing production-quality tests, refactors, and documentation into research software that is fully open source on GitHub.
14 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Physics, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Physics at New York UniversityPhD Astrophysics, PhD Astrophysics at Columbia University
Stackoverflow
185reputation
16kreached
5answers
3questions
Github Skills (29)
data-visualizations10
python10
data-science10
data-visualisation10
object-oriented-programming10
plot10
numpy10
astropy10
jupyter-notebook10
data-visualization10
documentation10
data-analysis10
matplotlib9
testing9
linked-data9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astropy-tutorials
Mar 2013 - Jan 2023
Tutorials for the Astropy Project
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:21 reviews, 715 commits, 193 PRs in 9 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Adrian contributed a series of changes to the documentation, focused on providing explanations and guidance to potential contributors. Their commits included adding a section that describes the directory structure and provides instructions on how to contribute. Additional changes provided context for users. They made minor grammatical corrections and clarified certain text to better explain the contributions process.
jupyter-bookpythonsciencesimulationlearn-astropy
astropy/astropy
Oct 2012 - Aug 2022
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:192 reviews, 1159 commits, 215 PRs in 10 years
Contributions summary:Adrian focused on modifying the `astropy/astropy` repository's core library. Their contributions primarily involved refactoring the codebase to separate text coloring from color printing, making text coloring private, and updating unit and representation class objects. The user implemented additions related to the handling of velocity components.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
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