Harry Ferguson
Astronomer at Space Telescope Science Institute
Riderwood, Maryland, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolHarry Ferguson is an experienced astronomer with over 30 years at the Space Telescope Science Institute, combining deep observational and theoretical expertise with practical scientific software development. Trained at Harvard (AB) and Johns Hopkins (PhD in Physics and Astronomy), he has held prestigious posts including a Hubble Fellowship and a Cambridge postdoc before his long-term role at STScI. Alongside his research, he contributes to open-source astronomy software—most notably adding SExtractor I/O support to the widely used Astropy library—bridging domain science and reproducible tooling. Based in Riderwood, Maryland, he brings a blend of institutional leadership, hands-on coding, and meticulous documentation that helps astronomers turn complex data into robust science. An understated strength is his knack for improving community infrastructure so that specialized algorithms become broadly accessible.
13 years of coding experience
Johns Hopkins UniversityAB, Astronomy and Astrophysics, AB, Astronomy and Astrophysics at Harvard University
Github Skills (7)
astropy10
python10
astronomy10
data-analysis9
unit-testing9
documentation8
modeling7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astropy
Oct 2012 - Sep 2019
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:
Data Scientist / Scientific Programmer
Data Scientist / Scientific ProgrammerContributions:10 commits, 1 PR, 33 comments in 7 years
Contributions summary:Harry primarily contributed to the `astropy/astropy` repository by implementing and testing functionality related to the `io.ascii` module, specifically for reading and writing SExtractor files. Their work involved creating a `SExtractor` reader class, integrating it into the `io.ascii` module, and adding test files to ensure the functionality's correctness. The user also improved the documentation, including adding the new `SExtractor` reader to relevant documentation files. Finally, the user contributed to the modeling documentation adding an example.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
hcferguson/dsii_dwarfs
Jun 2019 - Sep 2020
DSII Dwarfs
Contributions:6 pushes, 10 branches in 1 year 3 months
game
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.