Brett Morris
Senior Software Engineer at Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrett Morris is a Senior Astronomical Data Scientist with 13 years of experience combining astrophysics, statistical inference, and production-grade software to enable exoplanet and stellar science for JWST and the Roman Space Telescope. He bridges research and engineering—having authored scientific analysis pipelines, led machine-learning teams on 100k+ star rotation measurements, and product-owned cloud-based visualization and analysis tools at STScI. Brett contributes to flagship open-source projects like Astropy and Astroquery, improving core WCS functionality and NASA exoplanet archive tests, reflecting deep familiarity with community tooling. His PhD work on stellar magnetic activity informs pragmatic solutions for disentangling stellar variability from exoplanet signals, and he brings uncommon experience building efficient scientific software from holographic microscopy to space-mission scale data systems.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Astronomy and Astrobiology, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Astronomy and Astrobiology at University of WashingtonBS Astronomy, BS Astronomy at University of Maryland
Stackoverflow
811reputation
208kreached
6answers
8questions
Github Skills (12)
astroquery10
astropy10
python10
wcs10
astronomy10
data-analysis9
regex9
fits6
dask6
google-maps6
matplotlib6
cython6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astroquery
Oct 2016 - Dec 2019
Functions and classes to access online data resources. Maintainers: @keflavich and @bsipocz and @ceb8
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:28 commits, 4 PRs, 37 comments in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Brett primarily contributed to the project by adding and modifying documentation related to the `coord` property, a key feature of the `astroquery.exoplanets.PlanetParams` object, and by adding and modifying tests. The user implemented new tests for the NASA exoplanet archive. The tests cover coordinate checks and some of the data.
pythondataastropy-affiliatedastropyastronomy
astropy/astropy
Mar 2015 - Jun 2020
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:Backend Developer & Technical Writer
Backend Developer & Technical WriterContributions:61 reviews, 54 commits, 28 PRs in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Brett contributed to the core library, making improvements to the `wcs` module by implementing a temporary `__repr__` method for WCS objects. The user also fixed an issue related to a regex solution within the project's initialization file, `__init__.py`, adding bibtex citation and correcting to the upstream version of `__init__.py`. Furthermore, the user added and tested the method `is_url_in_cache` to support the caching functionality.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
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