Nathaniel Starkman
Postdoctoral Associate
Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathaniel Starkman is a postdoctoral associate and Brinson Prize Fellow in astrophysics with 11 years of research and software development experience, currently based in Cleveland and affiliated with MIT and the University of Toronto. He builds and maintains scientific software—most notably contributing backend improvements to the widely used Astropy library, where he implemented Cosmology write() functionality and strengthened internal consistency checks. His work bridges theoretical and computational physics, specializing in cosmology, Galactic dynamics, and reproducible tooling for astronomy. Nathaniel brings a history of outreach and teaching from CERN and university tutoring, translating complex concepts for diverse audiences. Colleagues know him for meticulous code hygiene and for turning rigorous theoretical models into practical, well-documented software. He pairs a Theoretical and Mathematical Physics background from Case Western with active stewardship of open-source astronomy projects.
11 years of coding experience
Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at Case Western Reserve University
English, Hebrew, Spanish
Github Skills (8)
code-standards10
latex10
data-serialization10
coding-style10
cosmology10
python10
code-formatting10
serialization10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astropy
Aug 2020 - Jan 2023
Astronomy and astrophysics core library
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:3602 reviews, 709 commits, 688 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Nathaniel primarily worked on the backend side of the Astropy project, modifying core cosmology functions to enhance the LaTeX table export feature. Their contributions focused on implementing the `write()` method for Cosmology classes, which allows writing cosmology objects to LaTeX tables, along with improvements to the code base and code style. The user also addressed issues by fixing internal consistency checks.
astrologypythonscienceastrophysicsastrodynamics
cosmology-api/cosmology.api
Jan 2023 - Mar 2023
The Cosmology API standard
Contributions:1 release, 45 reviews, 35 commits in 2 months
cosmologyapi
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