Fernando Perez

Fernando Pérez received his PhD in physics from the University of Colorado, which he followed up as a postdoctoral researcher in Applied Mathematics at the same university. He now works as a scientist at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on the development of tools for brain imaging problems and improving the status of scientific computing.

Towards the end of his graduate studies, he became involved with the development of Python tools for scientific computing: he started the open source IPython project in 2001 when looking for a more efficient interactive workflow for everyday scientific tasks. He continues to lead the IPython project along with a growing team of talented developers. He also is a member of the core matplotlib development team, and has contributed to numpy, scipy, sympy, mayavi and other Python projects.

He is a regular speaker on topics related to scientific computing in Python, having taught workshops at multiple institutions worldwide and keynote presentations at Scipy India, EuroSciPy and PyCon Canada. He is a member of the Python Software Foundation.

Fernando is a co-founder of Chronicle Labs, a startup that builds online tools for collaborative computing and data analysis based on the IPython architecture.

When not glued to a computer, he tries to spend as much time as possible with his wife outdoors hiking and backpacking, as well as climbing rocks and mountains.

For more details, please see his website.