Ricky Nilsson
Applications Developer
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRicky Nilsson is an Applications Developer and astronomer turned data scientist with nine years of experience building high-throughput image-processing pipelines, machine-learning classifiers, and visualization tools for exoplanet and microscopy data. Based in Los Angeles, he currently develops exploration and visualization tools for Caltech’s exoplanet archive and has a track record of accelerating pipelines by orders of magnitude through automation and precision image registration. His work spans academia and industry—from leading instrument upgrades and hyperspectral imaging projects to designing parallelized pipelines that extract and classify tens to hundreds of millions of photometric measurements in minutes. An active open-source contributor, he maintains and documents the astroquery NASA Exoplanet Archive module, keeping a critical community resource compatible with evolving APIs. Known for combining rigorous scientific analysis with production-grade Python tooling, he brings both domain expertise in astronomy and practical experience deploying scalable data workflows.
8 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Astronomy, Astrobiology, Physics, IT, Philosophy, Astronomy, Astrobiology, Physics, IT, Philosophy at Various University Level Courses and SchoolsMaster of Science, Engineering Physics, GPA: 3.7, Master of Science, Engineering Physics, GPA: 3.7 at The Faculty of Engineering at Lund UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Astronomy, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Astronomy at Stockholm University
English, Swedish, German, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (6)
astroquery10
api10
python10
apidoc10
documentation10
astronomy9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
astropy/astroquery
May 2021 - Nov 2022
Functions and classes to access online data resources. Maintainers: @keflavich and @bsipocz and @ceb8
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Technical Writer
Back-end Developer & Technical WriterContributions:23 reviews, 71 commits, 11 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Ricky primarily focused on maintaining and updating the `astroquery/nasa_exoplanet_archive` module. They addressed issues related to the NASA Exoplanet Archive's API, including compatibility updates and adjustments to deprecated tables. Further contributions included documentation updates and fixes to ensure the module's usability and accuracy. Additionally, the user made updates to test files, which is crucial for any project of this type.
pythondataastropy-affiliatedastropyastronomy
rickynilsson/astroquery
May 2021 - Mar 2025
Functions and classes to access online data resources. Maintainers: @keflavich and @bsipocz and @ceb8
Contributions:2 PRs, 30 pushes, 10 branches in 3 years 10 months
datamaintainers
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