Douglas Burke
Astrophysicist at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Watertown, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolDouglas Burke is an experienced astrophysicist with 26 years helping the scientific community extract value from X-ray observatory data, particularly for the Chandra X-ray Observatory at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He blends research on large-scale structure and universe evolution with practical skills in data-driven analysis, AstroStatistics, machine learning, visualization, and open-science practices. Douglas writes and maintains scientific tools, testing infrastructure, and documentation, and regularly supports users through workshops and consultations. His open-source work includes quality assurance and test automation contributions to the widely used astropy core library, improving robustness in file handling and tests. Trained with a PhD in Astrophysics and an MS in Information Technology, he sits at the intersection of rigorous research and modern software engineering. Colleagues rely on him for dependable tooling and clear guidance that turns complex astronomical datasets into reproducible science.
26 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Information Technology, Master of Science - MS, Information Technology at Imperial College LondonDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Astrophysics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Astrophysics at Durham University
Github Skills (7)
pytest10
python10
testing10
astropy9
documentation8
astrophysics7
astronomy7
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astropy
Aug 2015 - Oct 2019
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 commits, 4 PRs, 46 comments in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Douglas primarily focused on improving the testing infrastructure and addressing potential issues within the astropy library. Their contributions included fixing a bug related to file handling errors in fits.open, adding a test to prevent ResourceWarning warnings in Python 3, and correcting markup errors in documentation related to testing. These changes enhance the robustness and reliability of the library, ensuring proper handling of file operations and improving the quality of tests.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
DougBurke/sherpa-test-data
Jul 2015 - Aug 2023
Test data and scripts for Sherpa
Contributions:3 pushes, 9 branches in 8 years 2 months
sherpatest-datadata
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