Nadia Dencheva
Software Engineer at Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNadia Dencheva is a software engineer with 25 years of experience building scientific data pipelines and calibration tools for the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute. She has progressed from software developer to branch manager and now returns to engineering, combining institutional knowledge of astronomical instrumentation with hands-on coding. Her recent work includes WCS transformations for astrodrizzle and modeling/fitting packages, and she is an active contributor to flagship open-source projects such as Astropy and the JWST Python library. Nadia’s contributions span both backend development and technical documentation, improving usability of core astronomy models and adapting JWST data processing to evolving spectral and model structures. Based in Baltimore, she brings a physicist’s rigor (MSc in Physics) to solve complex observational-data problems and to make sophisticated tools accessible to the broader astronomy community.
24 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc) Physics, Master of Science (MSc) Physics at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski
Github Skills (4)
model-building10
documentation10
python10
astropy10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astropy
Nov 2012 - Jul 2022
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:141 reviews, 881 commits, 370 PRs in 9 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Nadia contributed to the `astropy/astropy` repository by documenting the internal models of the astronomy and astrophysics core library. They updated and added documentation to various modules including `models`, `introduction`, `parameters`, and `fitting`, as well as the `index.rst` file. This work focused on documenting the functionality and usage of the core library with the intention of making it easier for other users to understand, and extend the existing models and the fitting tools.
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:16 releases, 416 reviews, 1215 commits in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Nadia's commits primarily involved modifying and improving various aspects of the Python library for science observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. Their contributions focused on changing import statements within several files related to the assign_wcs module and its functionalities, and modifying the code to accommodate the shift in the source data, which includes changes to the spectral axis and various model classes. The changes suggest a focus on optimizing the processing of observational data within the framework.
python-librarypythonsciencewebbjwst
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