Mihai Cara
Senior Science Software Engineer at Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMihai Cara is a Senior Science Software Engineer in Baltimore with 12 years of experience applying theoretical physics and numerical modeling to astrophysics and medical imaging problems. At the Space Telescope Science Institute he designs and productionizes algorithms for image registration, sky subtraction and spectral extraction used in Hubble and James Webb processing pipelines. He is an active open-source maintainer and contributor to flagship astronomy libraries such as astropy, photutils and the JWST pipeline, where he improved WCS performance, refactored core resampling routines, and developed sky-background-matching algorithms now used in AstroDrizzle and JWST. His background spans MRI/CT physics, FEM/FDTD simulation, and instrument software, giving him an unusual blend of instrument-level modeling and large-scale scientific software engineering. Mihai’s work is characterized by turning complex numerical methods into robust, high-performance code that serves both researchers and mission pipelines.
12 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics/Astrophysics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics/Astrophysics at Purdue UniversityGheorghe Asachi High School (scoala #1), Chisinau, MoldovaBachelor of Science (B.S.), Physics/Theoretical Physics, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Physics/Theoretical Physics at University of Bucharest
Romanian, Russian, English, French
Github Skills (14)
astropy10
source210
python10
astrophysics10
photogrammetry10
image-processing10
astronomy10
numpy10
photo-viewer10
scipy9
data-modeling9
algorithm9
algorithms9
data-analysis8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astropy
Aug 2014 - Jan 2023
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:229 reviews, 138 commits, 86 PRs in 8 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Mihai primarily contributed to the `astropy/astropy` repository by improving the performance and stability of the `wcs.all_world2pix` function, which is part of the core astronomy and astrophysics library. Their work involved vectorizing the implementation and addressing issues related to convergence and RA wrapping. The user also fixed failing doctests by modifying the examples and changing test syntax. Additional work included renaming functions and fixing documentation related to the WCS.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
spacetelescope/jwst
Jun 2016 - Dec 2022
Python library for science observations from the James Webb Space Telescope
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:302 reviews, 179 commits, 264 PRs in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Mihai primarily focused on improving the codebase by fixing import statements and updating internal model representations, most notably by switching from using internal `jwst` to `stsci.tools`'s bitmask library. They also introduced and worked on features for sky background matching, developing algorithms to compute background corrections to minimize image discrepancies. The user also refactored the WCS pipeline and optimized a core routine to calculate the sampling wavelengths for the output resampled data.
python-librarypythonsciencewebbjwst
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