Pavlos Protopapas
Scientific Program Director at Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS) at Harvard University
Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPavlos Protopapas is a Scientific Program Director at Harvard's Institute for Applied Computational Science with 12 years blending teaching, research, student mentorship, and program leadership in data science. Trained as a physicist (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) and former research scientist in astronomy, he brings deep quantitative rigor to course design and advanced topics like deep learning and image classification. He has been instrumental in delivering Harvard's CS109A/B curriculum and capstone programs, while contributing technical teaching materials and notebooks to well-known open course repositories. His GitHub work shows hands-on involvement in making lecture and lab content accessible online and implementing practical deep-learning examples such as MNIST CNNs and regularization experiments. Based in Somerville, MA, he pairs academic pedigree with applied instructional engineering, often translating complex research concepts into clear, reproducible classroom resources. Colleagues value him for combining scientific curiosity with operational leadership in academic computing education.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
B.Sc. Physics, B.Sc. Physics at Imperial College LondonPh.D. Physics, Ph.D. Physics at University of Pennsylvania
Github Skills (18)
sgd10
python10
image-classification10
pandas10
machine-learning10
keras10
deep-learning10
html10
neural-network10
jupyter-notebook10
data-analysis10
convolutional-neural-networks9
eda9
exploratory-data-analysis9
data-cleaning9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
Harvard-IACS/2019-CS109A
Jun 2019 - Dec 2019
https://harvard-iacs.github.io/2019-CS109A/
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:75 commits, 69 pushes, 1 branch in 5 months
Contributions summary:Pavlos's primary contribution appears to be the addition of web pages related to lecture and lab content. These changes involve creating and integrating HTML documents, specifically for `Lecture1` and `Lecture3`, and the addition of a pre-lab for `Lab3`. The modifications suggest an effort to make course materials available online.
harvard
cs109/a-2017
Sep 2017 - Nov 2017
Public Repository for cs109a, 2017 edition
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:36 commits, 34 pushes, 1 comment in 2 months
Contributions summary:Pavlos made minor changes to the Lab2 notebook related to cleaning and exploratory data analysis (EDA). The commits included minor adjustments to the cleaning and EDA steps. The changes show an effort to improve the notebook's presentation and clarity regarding the cleaning and EDA of the dataset.
public-repositorymachine-learning
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