Bio

The human processing units behind the inSCIght podcast:

Geraldine Van der Auwera is a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Boston. She trained as an experimental microbiologist but her interest in genome evolution has led her to cross over into the computational side of things. She’s currently leading a bacterial genome sequencing project and working with python to develop analytical pipelines and visualization methods.

David Doria is currently working on a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He works in the field of computer vision and image processing. His research deals with 3D data analysis, particularly from LiDAR scanners. David works on the Visualization Toolkit and the Insight Toolkit, contributing heavily to the ITK and VTK Examples Wiki projects. He is also a leader of the Rensselaer Center for Open Source.

Milad Fatenejad is a research scientist at the Flash center for computational science at the University of Chicago. He recently graduated with his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. As a graduate student, he and several of his colleagues founded The Hacker Within – a student organization dedicated to teaching computational skills to students of science, math and engineering.

Katy Huff is a nuclear engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison developing a computational modeling platform for nuclear fuel cycle systems analysis.  She holds an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Chicago and has participated in varied research from nonlinear granular phase dynamics to anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background.  Her current research is concerned with the impacts of spent fuel storage and relies largely on C++, XML, and Python.

Puneet Kishor is a web application developer and forest modeler at the Dept. of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, UW-Madison, and a Science Fellow with Creative Commons. Puneet’s computing interests are in munging big data and designing open data archives, research interests are in measuring information openness and interoperability, and policy interests are in enabling government and research agencies adopt and follow sound and lasting open data principles.

Sean Knudsen is a Design Engineer at Applied Geomechanics, a monitoring systems and services company based in San Francisco. Sean specializes in PCB design, analog and digital electronics, and microcontroller system design. As a Design Engineer Sean designs, supports, repairs, tests, and programs electronic monitoring instruments, notably tiltmeters.

Jason McCampbell is a software engineer and has spent the last 15+ years writing technical computing applications, mostly design automation tools for the semiconductor industry.

Matthew McCormick is a medical imaging researcher working at Kitware, Inc. His research interests include medical image registration and ultrasound imaging. Matt is an active member of scientific open source software efforts such as the InsightToolkit and scientific Python communities.

Jeff Ramnani is a polyglot programmer who works in the finance industry. He likes solving problems and sometimes he gets paid to solve them using computers.

Jonathan Rocher, with experience in complex system modeling and scientific computing, contributes to Enthought’s fluid dynamics applications as well as course materials and training tools. Prior to working at Enthought, he was an instructor and research assistant in particle physics and astrophysics at the University of Texas and Brussels University. Jonathan holds a MS in physics and a PhD in particle physics and cosmology from the University of Paris, France.

Anthony Scopatz is a computational scientist and long time Python developer, Anthony holds his BS in Physics from UC Santa Barbara and MSE in Mechanical Engineering from UT Austin. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in Nuclear Engineering program at UT Austin. Anthony’s research interests revolve around physics-based modeling of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle and related information theoretic metrics. Anthony has published and spoken at numerous conferences on both Nuclear Engineering and Python.

Kurt Smith is a graduate student in Plasma Physics at UW-Madison; he enjoys cherry-picking computer language components, will take Fortran 95 + Python over C++ any day of the week, and is thrilled whenever computer science makes life easier as a researcher.

Peter Wang has been developing scientific and financial applications with Python for the last 6 years at Enthought, and recently started his own company, Streamitive, to build the next generation of tools for online analytics and scalable, large data visualization. Prior to this, he spent several years at a computer graphics startup, coding a global illumination renderer in C++. He has a degree in physics from Cornell.