Forrest Collman
Associate Director
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolForrest Collman is an Associate Director at the Allen Institute with 11 years of experience bridging neuroscience research and engineering to map large-scale neural connectivity. He leads teams that turn high-throughput microscopy and EM connectomics data into actionable science, co-leading major projects and serving as Co-PI on NIH BRAIN CONNECTS grants. Trained as a Princeton-educated neuroscientist with a PhD and a background in physics, he designed scalable image reconstruction and collaborative proofreading systems (the Connectome Annotation Versioning Engine) used across consortia like MICrONS and FlyWire. An active open-source contributor, he has improved testing and performance in SciPy and enhanced Neuroglancer’s UI for volumetric data visualization, demonstrating a rare blend of domain expertise, software craftsmanship, and attention to reproducible, community-facing tools.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Neuroscience and Molecular Biology, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Neuroscience and Molecular Biology at Princeton University
Stackoverflow
11reputation
507reached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (15)
webgl10
algorithms10
typescript10
scipy10
javascript10
user-interface10
typescripts10
pytest10
python10
scientific-computing10
typescript-types10
data-structure9
data-structures9
cython7
hadoop6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
google/neuroglancer
Apr 2018 - Sep 2018
WebGL-based viewer for volumetric data
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 23 commits, 16 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Forrest primarily focused on enhancing the user interface and interaction within the neuroglancer project. Their contributions included fixing bugs related to stack bounds rendering, implementing new annotation features, and modifying existing UI behaviors through event handling and mouse interaction. They also made style and formatting changes and improved overall code structure.
volumetric-dataviewervolumetricwebgl
scipy/scipy
Jan 2019 - Feb 2019
SciPy library main repository
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:6 commits, 53 comments, 2 issues in 1 month
Contributions summary:Forrest primarily focused on refactoring and improving tests within the SciPy library, specifically related to the `sparse.csgraph` module. They migrated tests to use pytest parameterization for enhanced efficiency and maintainability. The contributions include the addition of new features like `min_only` search to the Dijkstra algorithm, as well as optimization and documentation improvements.
scipypythonscientific-computing
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.