Product Owner at Zupit, starting August 18, 2025.
Formerly, Senior Astronomical Data Scientist for the JWST data analysis tools.
Photo credit: David Friedlander (GSFC)
I am a Product Owner and a Data Scientist.
I just finished an appointment at the Space
Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore and I am about to start a new adventure as Product
Owner in Trento (Italy) at Zupit!
At STScI I was a senior data scientist for astronomy and the Product Owner
of a group of software engineers to develop the
James Webb Space Telescope data analysis and visualization tools, Jdaviz.
The team also collaborates on the development of Astropy
coordinated packages (photutils, specutils, specreduce).
Research wise, I am interested in galaxy formation and evolution and especially into
deriving the star formation histories of galaxies from the fossil records in the data.
I am survey manager of the GARDEN and MEADOW surveys where we use the NIRSpec multi
object spectrograph on JWST to look at galaxies at redshifts 1 to 6 and derive their
physical and kinematic properties.
I was the Product Owner of the JWST Data Analysis Tools at the Space Telescope Science Institute. These include the development of astronomical libraries (Specutils, Photutils, Specreduce, etc.), the JWST Data Analysis and Visualization package (Jdaviz), and the development of science-case Jupyter Notebooks (hosted under the jdat_notebooks repository).
Because I made my career out of spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting to derive galaxy physical parameters,
I was now one of the organizers of the
Pan-Survey SED Fitting Forum. I gathered interest in
specific topics from our committee and the community and I organized virtual sessions where 2-3 experts show thier
latest results followed by a moderated discussion.
I also enjoy teaching, and last year, I obtained my certification as
Carpentries Instructor. My favorite modules to teach are
the basics of Python, data analysis, and git.
How open source brings us the images of the universe with JWST and Hubble
Interview for Github Universe, 2022
The art of measuring galaxy physical properties
Talk for the IAU, 2023
Imviz: Creating Color Composite Images
Jdaviz tutorial, 2024