I feel deeply honoured to be nominated as for the Astropy Coordination Committee. Coming from a research background in theoretical astrophysics, Python and its scientific ecosystem has formed a key part of my data analysis workflow since searching for a free – open source – and versatile processing environment. For a number of years Astropy has become to me an example of a collaborative project striving to bundle the creative forces of an entire discipline. As a contributor, and for the past two years, co-maintainer of the Astropy core package, I am bringing the experience of a research scientist on the path to scientific software developer.
As a CoCo member I would put place a priority on facing the challenges, highlighted several times already in our developer meetings as well as e.g. on recent Scipy conferences, of ensuring a stable environment for a project growing both in size and complexity. Having recently become a general core package maintainer and an affiliate package editor, I feel I am having a relatively good overview of the Astropy ecosystem as a whole.
Astropy is at this point strongly driven by the activity of US-based contributors, both in numbers of active and long-time developers and the commitment of major research institutions such as STScI. As a non-native English speaker and having spent the major part of my career outside of North America, I feel committed to improve the environment for contributors more distances, by language, culture and geography, from this centre. This would also include a greater presence at relevant workshops and meetings in Europe and on other continents.