Brief work History.
2017- Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Deputy Project Manager for Software and Data management Project Manager and since 2019 Associate Director for Data Production
2005-2017. Ground segment development manager and then Mission manager for Gaia. After Gaia launch in 2013 took on the head of the development division in charge of ground segments for all science missions in development and study.
2003 to 2005.Projects included the National Virtual Observatory and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In particular for SDSS developed CasJobs to handle the large volume of long queries on the multi terabyte dataset.
2000-2002 took a break from space and science and went to work for Laverock von Schoultz in sunny Gibraltar. Worked mainly on the multilingual XSLT solution for Victor Chandler.
1996-2000 European Space Research & Technology Centre on several missions including : Hipparcos, Integral, Planck and Gaia.
1993-1996 European Space Operations Centre on ENVISAT/SCOSII and ATOS.
Interests/projects
Vera C. Rubin Data Management
The Rubin data management development is a massive open source project for image processing, petascale computing and querying. The graphic on the right is from Hyper Suprime Cam produced using the Rubin Science Pipeline code. All code is public on github.
Gaia's Astrometric Global Iterative Solution
Worked on the initial prototype for the Gaia global processing with Lennart Lindegren and eventually implemented the Astrometric solution used for the Gaia mission. The global solution for such a massive dataset (>100Tb) represented an interesting problem from both the Computer science and Astronomy perspectives. The original prototype is discussed in An Object Oriented framework for Gaia data processing . Currently this is being extended to a more general system to attempt processing simulated Gaia data. The final implementation is presented in Implementing the Gaia Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS) in Java
Tessellation HTM and HEALPix
While at JHU was curator of the Hierarchical Triangular Mesh . The HTM is a neat spherical partitioning scheme. Initially produced the Java version of the HTM library currently in used on Gaia. Produced a Java version of Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization (HEALPix) , the paper Splitting The Sky: HEALPix and HTM compares the two schemes. Several of the HEALPix routines were also coded in C# to include in the SkyServer
Java - ShowSky - Hipparcos Animations
Started developing Java applications for Astronomy in 1996 with the JDK1.0. Many applets were written to present the Hipparcos data in different forms for which the legacy code is now on github. Over 1999 - 2000 this turned into ShowSky for GSC-II quality control at STScI (while working in Gibraltar).
Astronomy and Computing Journal
It is difficult to publish on topics which are both astronomy and computing related, often the topic is deemed not computer science enough for computing journals and not scientific enough for astronomy. At ADASS conferences this was often a topic of discussion and eventually we started Astronomy and Computing with Elsevier. Other journals now accept algorithmic and computing papers but ASCOM was first. I am a founding editor.