David Shupe
Data Scientist And Astronomer
Pasadena, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Shupe is a data scientist and astronomer with 13+ years building large-scale astronomical data systems at Caltech/IPAC, where he analyzes millions of images and tens of billions of sources for the NEO Surveyor Survey Data Center. He combines deep domain expertise in astrometry, calibration and instrumentation with production-grade software engineering—using Apache Spark, scientific Python and R—to turn survey telemetry into reliable catalogs and algorithms. A long-time archive and instrument scientist, he has led calibration and pipeline efforts for major missions including Spitzer and Herschel and designed observing programs that produced multi-million source catalogs. Active in open source, he is a maintainer and back-end contributor to Astropy, having modernized its constants module to current CODATA and IAU standards, and has improved scholarly tooling for the SciPy proceedings by integrating and validating ORCID metadata. Based in Pasadena, he blends hands-on telescope/instrument experience with large-data engineering, making him equally at home in the control room, the archive, and the codebase.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Physics, Electrical Engineering, B.S., Physics, Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPh.D., Physics, Astronomy, Ph.D., Physics, Astronomy at Cornell University
English, German
Github Skills (14)
astropy10
refactoring10
python10
astronomy10
pytest9
unit-test9
latex9
unit-testing9
xml9
data-structures8
data-structure8
astrophysics8
algorithms5
algorithm5
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
scipy-conference/scipy_proceedings
May 2018 - Apr 2022
Tools used to generate the SciPy conference proceedings
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:25 reviews, 32 commits, 8 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:David focused on enhancing the functionality of the SciPy conference proceedings generation tools. They implemented the inclusion of ORCID identifiers for authors, modifying the code to accept and process ORCID information. The changes involved updating data structures and integrating ORCID metadata into the CrossRef XML generation process. Furthermore, they added validation to the ORCID input ensuring it adheres to a valid format.
proceedingspythonscipy
astropy/astropy
Jun 2013 - Jul 2020
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 reviews, 83 commits, 9 PRs in 7 years 2 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on refactoring and updating the `astropy.constants` module within the Astropy library. Their contributions involved reorganizing constants into versioned modules, updating existing constants to reflect current standards (CODATA 2014 and IAU 2015), and modifying test suites to align with these changes. They also made minor improvements in the units and cosmology modules, including adding tests and fixing formatting.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
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