Chapter 8 About the authors

8.1 Project lead

Lorena A. Barba

Lorena A. Barba is Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University. She adopted Jupyter in 2013 and since then used it in every course she teaches. Her open course materials are well known and used by thousands of learners: CFD Python and Numerical MOOC are the best examples.

8.2 Authors at the sprint

Lecia J. Barker

Lecia Barker is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also a Senior Research Scientist for the National Center for Women & IT. Her research group is studying the diffusion and adoption of teaching practices in undergraduate computer science. Lecia holds a Ph.D. in Communication from CU Boulder and an MBA in Marketing from San Diego State University.

Douglas Blank

Douglas Blank is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bryn Mawr College, a small, all-women’s college outside of Philadelphia, PA, USA. He has a joint Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Computer Science from Indiana University, Bloomington. For over 20 years, Douglas has taught all levels of Computer Science. For the last 4 years, he has used Jupyter notebooks exclusively in the classroom. Douglas has published in the areas of Computer Science Education, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Deep Learning. He is on the advisory board of Engage-CSEdu.org, a joint project between Google and the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). Douglas also writes text and code at his website douglasblank.com.

Jed Brown

Jed Brown is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has been teaching numerical and scientific computing courses using Jupyter Notebook and nbgrader for three years, and leads a research group that develops computational methods and community software for computational science.

Allen Downey

Allen Downey is a professor of Computer Science at Olin College and the author of a series of open-source textbooks related to software and data science, including Think Python, Think Bayes, and Think Complexity, published by O’Reilly Media. These books, and the classes based on them, use Jupyter notebooks extensively. Prof Downey holds a Ph.D. in computer science from U.C. Berkeley, and M.S. and B.S. degrees from MIT.

Tim George

Timothy George is the Lead UI/UX Designer for Project Jupyter, focusing primarily on JupyterLab. In addition to his formal duties, Tim is also in working with Jupyter on design strategy, future products, governance, diversity and inclusion. He studied HCI at UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Informatics and Computer Science where he received a Master’s Degree.

Lindsey Heagy

Lindsey Heagy is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California Berkeley working on Project Jupyter and Jupyter in the geosciences. She recently completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia in geophysics. She is a project leader of GeoSci.xyz, an effort to build collaborative, interactive, web-based textbooks in the geosciences, and a core contributor to SimPEG, an open source framework for geophysical simulation and inversions. The GeoSci.xyz project relies heavily on Jupyter for making the content come to life.

Kyle Mandli

Kyle Mandli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University. He has developed a set of openly available course notes centered around Jupyter notebooks and uses Jupyter for homework in conjunction with nbgrader. His other research interests include development of computational methods for coastal hazards such as storm surge and tsunamis.

Jason K. Moore

Jason K. Moore is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He currently teaches dynamics and mechanical design related courses. He utilizes Jupyter notebooks to teach modeling and simulation and is working on a textbook about Mechanical Vibrations. He is responsible for the Jupyter related features in the LibreTexts project and is also a core developer of the SymPy and PyDy projects which utilizes Jupyter for training workshops, e.g. PyDy Tutorial and SymPy Code Generation Tutorial. Jason has PhD, MSc, and BSc degrees in mechanical engineering from UC Davis and Old Dominion University.

David Lippert

  • Leidos

David Lippert is a software engineer at Leidos in Arlington, Virginia. He utilizes Jupyter notebooks primarily for exploratory data analysis and for training and evaluating machine learning algorithms. He has written Jupyter notebooks to create new Dr. Seuss sonnets and to evaluate if the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer can be trusted. He has a BA in computer science from Middlebury College.

Kyle E. Niemeyer

Kyle Niemeyer is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. He teaches courses in numerical and analytical methods for solving differential equations as well as gas dynamics, and recently developed a graduate course on software development for engineering research. His research group develops and applies methods for modeling combustion and chemically reacting fluid flows. He is also on the steering committee of the Cantera open-source project for chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, and transport processes.

Ryan Watkins

Ryan Watkins is a Professor of Educational Technology at George Washington University in Washington DC. He leads the Human-Technology Collaboration (HTC) PhD program area, and he teaches courses in needs assessment, instructional design, and research methods. Ryan’s research focuses on how people and organizations define and assess needs. He is co-host of Parsing Science, a podcast where researchers share the stories behind their science. He also developed the We Share Science platform for sharing video abstracts of research.

Richard H. West

Richard West is Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. He leads a research group in computational modeling for complex reacting systems like combustion or catalysis. He is a core member of the Cantera open-source project. As well as in an elective on “computational modeling in chemical engineering”, he has integrated Python and Jupyter into core classes on chemical kinetics and reactor design, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. As part of his NSF CAREER award, he is developing modules to teach students to use Python and SciPy to solve chemical engineering problems.

Elizabeth Wickes

Elizabeth Wickes is a Lecturer at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She teaches foundational programming from an information and data sciences perspective, as well as other coursework on open data and reproducibility. Her programming course lectures are written in Jupyter notebooks and the class is taught via live coding.

Carol Willing

Carol Willing is a Research Software Engineer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo working full-time on Project Jupyter. She is a Python Software Foundation Fellow and former Director; a Project Jupyter Steering Council member; and a core developer on CPython and Jupyter. Carol has an M.S. in Management from MIT and a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Duke.

Michael Zingale

Michael Zingale is an Associate Professor and computational astrophysicist at Stony Brook University. He has a PhD from University of Chicago (2000). He frequently teaches numerical methods and Python for scientific computing graduate courses, relying on Jupyter notebooks and python for much of the presentation. He is an advocate for open educational resources, as a founder of the Open Astrophysics Bookshelf project where he hosts his Introduction to Computational Astrophysical Hydrodynamics text.