Clare Shanahan
Software Engineer I at Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolClare Shanahan is a software engineer with eight years of experience building and testing scientific software at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. She combines back-end development and test automation skills, contributing to high-profile open-source projects such as Astropy and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) pipeline. Her work includes adding robust WCS-fitting functions to Astropy and improving NIRSPEC test coverage for JWST, demonstrating attention to numerical correctness and reliability in production science code. With a bachelor’s in astrophysics from Rutgers, she pairs domain knowledge in astronomical data formats (FITS, headerlets) with practical engineering. Clare is comfortable moving between code, documentation, and tests to close the loop on feature delivery and quality. She brings a researcher’s curiosity to software problems, often exploring alternative astrometric solutions before settling on a production-ready approach.
8 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Astrophysics, Bachelor’s Degree, Astrophysics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Github Skills (15)
testing10
fits10
astropy10
notebook10
pytest10
python10
astrophysics10
wcs10
scientific-computing10
astronomy10
data-analysis10
scipy9
astroquery9
pandas8
documentation8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
spacetelescope/notebooks
Jun 2019 - Jan 2022
Curated Notebooks from STScI
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:10 commits, 3 PRs, 10 comments in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Clare contributed to a notebook focusing on astrometry solutions for HST images, demonstrating skills in astronomical data analysis. Their work included adding notebooks and requirements files, implementing data download functionalities using astroquery and MAST, and exploring different astrometric solutions. They also worked on applying and restoring headerlets within the FITS files, demonstrating understanding of FITS file structures.
maststscinotebooksastronomyspacex
astropy/astropy
Oct 2019 - Sep 2021
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 reviews, 31 commits, 17 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Clare implemented and refined a function to compute the WCS (World Coordinate System) from points within the Astropy library. Their contributions involved adding the `fit_wcs_from_points` function, modifying existing WCS utility code, and updating documentation and test cases to support the new functionality. The user also addressed feedback by making changes based on code reviews, indicating a focus on code quality and integration within the broader Astropy framework. They extended the functionality of existing code and improved user documentation.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
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