Eric Ford
Director Of Research at Penn State Eberly College of Science
State College, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolEric Ford is a distinguished astrophysicist and research leader with 14 years of experience advancing exoplanet detection, characterization, and planetary system dynamics. He directs interdisciplinary research and graduate training at Penn State, leading the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences while also serving as Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Exoplanets & Habitable Worlds. His work blends astrostatistics, high-performance scientific computing, and astrobiology to translate large, noisy datasets into population-level insights about planet formation and habitability. Known for building cross-disciplinary bridges between astronomy and data science, he cultivates collaborative teams that develop novel statistical methods and scalable computation for survey-scale problems. Trained at MIT (SB) and Princeton (PhD), he combines deep theoretical grounding with practical leadership in research infrastructure and education. Less obvious: he routinely pairs rigorous statistical modeling with hands-on computational optimization to make ambitious exoplanet demographic studies feasible at scale.
14 years of coding experience
S.B., Physics, Mathematics, S.B., Physics, Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Astrophysical Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University
Github Skills (146)
programming-language10
radial10
statistics10
julialang10
root-finding10
wolfram-language10
science10
julia10
probability10
numerical10
pluto10
spectra10
data-science10
distributions10
machine-learning10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
ExoJulia/ExoplanetsSysSim.jl
Apr 2019 - Jan 2021
Exoplanet System Simulation: core files
Contributions:4 releases, 1 review, 52 commits in 1 year 9 months
pythonsbmlsimulationexoplanetsystem-simulation
eford/PlutoTeachingTools.jl
Aug 2022 - Sep 2024
Functions useful when using Pluto in teaching.
Contributions:7 PRs, 25 pushes in 2 years 1 month
plutoteachingfunctional-programmingjulia
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