Britton Smith
Reader at Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBritton Smith is a Reader and computational astrophysicist based in Edinburgh with 18 years of experience building simulation and data-analysis software for cosmology. He combines academic leadership—holding roles from Chancellor’s Fellow to Assistant Research Scientist—with hands-on development, notably contributing backend improvements to the widely used yt Project for analyzing astrophysical simulation data. His work bridges theory, large-scale simulation pipelines, and practical tooling to handle diverse particle data formats and simulation models. Trained with a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Penn State and a physics BS from Wisconsin–Madison, he brings deep domain knowledge and a developer’s attention to reproducible, extensible research software.
18 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Physics, Bachelor of Science (BS), Physics at University of Wisconsin-MadisonPhD, Astronomy and Astrophysics, PhD, Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University
Spanish, English
Github Skills (11)
data-structures10
hdf10
python10
data-structure10
scientific-computing9
event-handling9
apidoc9
api9
data-handling9
cosmology8
fortran7
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
yt-project/yt
May 2008 - Aug 2022
Main yt repository
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:96 reviews, 2236 commits, 138 PRs in 14 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Britton primarily contributed to the code base by modifying and cleaning up various definition and code files, including those related to particle-related data structures and the handling of different simulation models (Gadget, OWLS, Eagle). Their contributions included fixing import statements, adding support for various file formats, and refactoring code to improve functionality. The user's work suggests a focus on building the underlying infrastructure and tools to enable data handling and analysis in a cosmological context.
pythondatafinite-element-analysisgeophysicsnuclear-engineering
brittonsmith/queue_stat
Aug 2011 - Feb 2021
Contributions:21 commits, 2 PRs, 5 pushes in 9 years 7 months
jobmonitorjob-queue
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