Sarah Blunt
NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Santa Cruz
Los Gatos, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolSarah Blunt is an NSF-funded Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz with eight years of experience bridging observational exoplanet science, statistical methods, and scientific software development. She led orbitize!, an open-source Python package used in over 100 astrophysics publications, managing a 20-person team to optimize algorithm speed, usability, and accuracy. Her work combines rigorous PhD-level astronomy training from Caltech with a mathematical physics foundation from Brown, enabling strong quantitative modeling and computational expertise. Sarah brings a product-minded approach to research software—prioritizing reproducibility, testing, and community adoption—while continuing to publish on exoplanet science. Based in Los Gatos, she pairs academic curiosity with practical engineering, and outside of work she balances code and statistics with creative interests like cake decoration.
8 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (with honors) - BS, Mathematical Physics, Bachelor of Science (with honors) - BS, Mathematical Physics at Brown UniversityCalifornia Institute of Technology
Github Skills (29)
simulation10
random-walk10
radial10
cosmology10
orbital-mechanics10
astrology10
orbit10
velocity10
modeling10
astronomy9
mkdocs9
sphinx-doc9
python9
sphinx9
astrophysics9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
sblunt/orbitize
Jan 2018 - Nov 2022
Orbit-fitting for directly imaged objects
Contributions:45 releases, 41 reviews, 740 commits in 4 years 10 months
fittingimagedorbitorbital-mechanics
California-Planet-Search/planet-pi
Sep 2019 - Nov 2023
Contributions:5 pushes in 4 years 3 months
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