Perry Greenfield

Perry Greenfield received a Ph.D. in Physics from M.I.T. His thesis was based on Very Large Array radio observations of the first discovered gravitational lens. After a short stint in communications engineering at Bell Labs, he ended up at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where he has worked for the last 26 years. He initially was responsible for calibrating the Faint Object Camera for the Hubble Space Telescope, but for the last 16 years he has been leading the Science Software Branch. He has pioneered the use of Python in astronomy, and his group has been heavily involved in Python for the last 12 years. They have developed PyRAF, numarray (the precursor to current NumPy capabilities), PyFITS, and been heavily involved in the development and support of matplotlib. His group is now heavily involved in developing the science software to support the next large space telescope under construction, the James Webb Space Telescope.