The presenter is Tom Aldcroft, an astrophysicist working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA. In addition to science research he has a key responsibility supporting science and mission operations of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. To this end he has developed a significant infrastructure of Python-based tools for data analysis, modeling, and trending. This includes the Xija modeling framework and the asciitable package for reading and writing ASCII tabular data. He received a NASA award in 2011 for his efforts using Python for Chandra thermal modeling.

Tom has made contributions to the Python community by leading the development of both the astropython.org site and the python4astronomers site. The latter was the basis for a 7-part workshop series held at the Center for Astrophysics during which about 40 astronomers were taught data analysis using Python.