Thomas Caswell
Data Acquisition And Detector Deputy Group Leader
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inScientific Computing and Data Science
Thomas Caswell is a physics-trained software leader with 17 years of experience building data acquisition, detector, and computational systems at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he now serves as Data Acquisition and Detector Deputy Group Leader. He combines deep scientific domain knowledge from a PhD in physics with hands-on engineering—leading Matplotlib as Project Lead and contributing to major scientific Python projects like NumPy, SciPy, h5py, Cython, and trackpy. His work spans backend systems, QA/test automation, documentation, and front-end integration (notably ipympl), reflecting a rare blend of low-level compatibility fixes and high-level API design. He has a strong track record improving reliability and test infrastructure across widely used repos (e.g., dnspython, toolz, scipy) and adding robust HDF5 and virtual dataset support in h5py. Colleagues rely on him to translate experimental requirements into reproducible software and to tame brittle scientific workflows into maintainable tools. An experimentalist at heart, he brings pragmatic engineering to soft condensed matter and tomography problems, often revealing subtle issues through meticulous testing and documentation.
17 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
BA, Physics and Mathematics, BA, Physics and Mathematics at Cornell UniversityPhD, physics, PhD, physics at University of Chicago
Chinese
Stackoverflow
85,963reputation
21.6mreached
926answers
6questions
colors
top-5%
matplotlib
top-1%
legend
top-1%
redirect
top-5%
animation
top-1%
git
top-5%
Github Skills (113)
cpython10
graph-algorithms10
restructuredtext10
python10
testing10
test-framework10
analyse10
ipython10
c1110
c1710
microbiome10
font-face10
dnspython10
graph-visualization10
cython10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
matplotlib/matplotlib
Aug 2012 - Jan 2023
matplotlib: plotting with Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 releases, 2279 reviews, 6403 commits in 10 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Thomas's commits indicate a focus on bug fixes and improvements within the Matplotlib project, specifically regarding internal functions such as the font and the handling of edge colors and text. The commits touch code across core components like font rendering and the text API. These fixes showcase the user's ability to diagnose and address issues within the internal workings of the library, which directly improves the user experience.
pythondata-sciencegtkdata-visualizationplotting
h5py/h5py
Feb 2013 - Jan 2023
HDF5 for Python -- The h5py package is a Pythonic interface to the HDF5 binary data format.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 releases, 98 reviews, 331 commits in 10 years
Contributions summary:Thomas's commits primarily focused on extending the HDF5 for Python library, specifically involving the modification of property lists. These changes included the addition of functionality related to dataset access properties (DAID) and object creation properties (OCID). The contributions also encompassed the addition of a VDS (Virtual Dataset) and related properties, and associated tests.
h5pybinary-datapythondata-formathdf5
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