Leo Singer
Research Astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLeo Singer is a research astrophysicist and software engineer with 16 years of experience building real-time, production-grade systems for astrophysics and open-source scientific software. At NASA Goddard he leads the autonomous scheduling system for a $300M space telescope, negotiates cloud contracts that save taxpayer money, and manages cross-disciplinary teams using Kafka, React, and AWS Lambda to route time-sensitive observations to a global collaboration. He holds a Caltech PhD in Physics and contributed to the gravitational-wave detection effort while coordinating high-performance, real-time pipelines across dozens of institutions. A prolific open-source maintainer and bug-smasher, his code touches core projects like Astropy, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, three.js and Remix—work that spans C APIs, numerical correctness, developer tooling, and UX improvements. Colleagues rely on him for bridging deep domain science with pragmatic engineering, from WCS fixes in Astropy to DynamoDB-backed session stores in modern web frameworks.
16 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
California Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Science - BS, Physics, Bachelor of Science - BS, Physics at University of Maryland
French
Github Skills (73)
parser10
python10
optimizers10
astronomy10
testing10
analyse10
type-system10
c9910
remix10
build-automation10
3d10
scientific-computing10
optimization10
javascript10
coordinate-transformation10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
healpy/healpy
Aug 2012 - Jan 2023
Python healpix maps tools
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 reviews, 242 commits, 163 PRs in 10 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Leo primarily contributed to the setup and configuration of the HEALPy package, which involves tools for the analysis of HEALPix maps. Their work focused on modifying build scripts and configuration files, particularly `setup.py`, to improve compiler compatibility and incorporate build options. They also refactored the source code to ensure better integration with external HEALPix libraries and included tools to improve the generation of wheels.
pythonmaphealpixgis
astropy/astropy
Nov 2012 - Feb 2022
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Astronomer/Astrophysicist
Back-end Developer & Astronomer/AstrophysicistContributions:73 reviews, 92 commits, 49 PRs in 9 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Leo primarily contributed to the `astropy/astropy` repository by addressing bugs and implementing features related to the core functionalities of the library. Their work includes fixing issues with the WCS module, specifically adding and improving the iterative inverse of `wcs.all_pix2world`. Furthermore, they addressed issues related to angle parsing, particularly with sexagesimal angles, and implemented changes to warnings and error handling within the coordinate module. They also made various enhancements to other modules, including documentation updates.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
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