I am honored to have been nominated and pleased to stand in this year’s election for the Astropy Coordination Committee.
Since 2016, I have been a staff scientist at the University of California Observatories. I received my PhD in Astronomy from UW-Madison in 2009, after which I worked as a postdoc in the Netherlands and the UK. I primarily work on software and instrumentation development for the Lick and Keck Observatories, and I try to do galaxy evolution science when I can.
Although I am a long-time Astropy user, I am very new to the Astropy project. My interactions with the Astropy team have continued to grow over the past two years or so, culminating with hosting the 2025 Astropy Coordination Meeting in Santa Cruz this past summer. I have made a modest contribution to astropy.nddata, and I continue to organize monthly meetings toward community development of spectroscopy tools, including the Astropy-coordinated packages specutils and specreduce. Beyond this, I have a relatively long history of involvement in open-source projects — specifically, the data-analysis pipeline (DAP) for the SDSS-IV/MaNGA survey (sdss-mangadap) and the PypeIt spectroscopic data-reduction package — and believe strongly in its importance to astronomy and to science more broadly.
As a new member of the CoCo, I would be excited to learn from long-serving members of the leadership team and to bring new perspectives, experiences, and expertise from my involvement in other projects.