Ilan Gold
Research Software Engineer Theis Lab at Helmholtz Munich
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIlan Gold is a research software engineer with 7 years of experience building scalable visualization and big-data analysis tools for single-cell and imaging biology. Based in Munich, he is a lead contributor and original author on high-impact open-source projects like Vitessce, Viv/Avivator, and AnnData, and he developed zarrs-python to bridge Rust I/O performance into Python workflows. He blends front-end WebGL expertise (deck.gl, geotiff.js) with back-end data engineering, enabling multi-core and multi-GPU out-of-core analyses for extremely large datasets. At Helmholtz Munich and previously at Harvard Medical School, he has applied this stack to production portals and research platforms, shipping both tooling and novel statistical workflows. Ilan’s background in mathematics informs his practical contributions to performant data structures and numerical robustness, such as 64-bit parsing fixes and GPU-aware AnnData features. He’s actively expanding into Rust while continuing to connect low-level I/O performance to researcher-facing visualization and analysis.
7 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Mathematics, Master's degree Mathematics at Technical University of MunichBachelor of Arts (B.A.) Mathematics, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Mathematics at University of Pennsylvania
English, Spanish, German
Github Skills (12)
webgl10
data-visualizations10
data-visualization10
javascript10
data-visualisation10
testing9
data-structure9
error-handling9
data-structures9
maps8
geospatial-analysis8
react7
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
geotiffjs/geotiff.js
Mar 2020 - Mar 2021
geotiff.js is a small library to parse TIFF files for visualization or analysis. It is written in pure JavaScript, and is usable in both the browser and node.js applications.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 reviews, 9 commits, 9 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Ilan focused on improving the accuracy and robustness of the `geotiff.js` library by addressing 64-bit integer and unsigned integer arithmetic in the data parsing and processing logic. They added error handling, including more informative console messages, and implemented tests to validate the correct parsing of 64-bit integer values. The user's work included refactoring code and introducing a `DataView64` class for improved handling of 64-bit data, and other improvements to the data slice class.
tiffgeospatialbrowsertiff-filesnode-js
visgl/deck.gl
Jan 2020 - Apr 2022
WebGL2 powered visualization framework
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:31 reviews, 20 commits, 21 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Ilan primarily contributed to the `deck.gl` project by implementing and refining the `TileLayer` component, specifically addressing non-geospatial tiling functionalities and its integration with the existing framework. Their work involved modifying existing code and adding features like the `extent` and `zoomOffset` props. The user also resolved issues related to request handling and caching within the tile loading mechanism, ensuring efficient and correct tile rendering.
pythonwebgljavascriptwebgl2threejs
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