Erik Tollerud
Assistant Astronomer at Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolErik Tollerud is an astrophysicist and software developer with 17 years of experience blending observational research on dwarf galaxies and near-field cosmology with robust scientific software engineering. Based in Baltimore at the Space Telescope Science Institute, he conducts research while architecting and maintaining open-source tools used across astronomy—co-founding and coordinating efforts in the Astropy ecosystem. His contributions span backend development, testing and CI, and documentation for high-profile projects like IPython, urllib3, emcee, and many Astropy subpackages, reflecting a rare mix of domain science and production-quality code. He’s known for improving reproducibility and usability—adding features like MCMC resumption, IO compatibility, PSF photometry enhancements, and richer tutorial content—helping both researchers and learners get reliable results from complex pipelines.
17 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Physics, BS, Physics at University of Puget SoundPhD, Astrophysics, PhD, Astrophysics at University of California, Irvine
Stackoverflow
960reputation
160kreached
9answers
1question
numpy
top-5%
Github Skills (51)
notebook10
benchmark10
develop10
pytest10
python10
jupyter10
astronomy10
data-science10
testing10
css10
code-standards10
open-source10
benchmarking10
ipython10
astropy10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
spacetelescope/notebooks
Nov 2018 - Sep 2022
Curated Notebooks from STScI
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:39 reviews, 98 commits, 38 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Erik's primary contribution involved re-adding notebook content, likely after a repository rewrite aimed at removing unnecessary executed cells and improving organization. This content appears to be focused on astronomical data analysis using curated notebooks. The user's work demonstrates skills in accessing and visualizing data from Full Frame Images, World Coordinate Systems, and plotting catalog data.
maststscinotebooksastronomyspacex
OpenAstronomy/openastronomy.github.io
Feb 2015 - Mar 2022
The web site for the Open Astronomy effort.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 52 commits, 15 PRs in 7 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Erik primarily worked on updating and maintaining the website's content and layout. They fixed the logo, corrected mailing list links, and updated links to various astronomy projects. They also performed a major reorganization of the site structure and improved the footer design.
commonseffortweb-siteportalastronomy
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