Board President

Dr. Julie Hollek has been a long-time user and champion of Scientific Python and the ecosystem. She is the co-chair of the SciPy Conference and has volunteered with the conference for 10 years. She previously served on NumFOCUS’ Diversity & Inclusion in Scientific Computing (DISC) committee. Julie earned her Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin and was most recently the Director of Data Science at Mozilla. At Mozilla, she led teams that leveraged the SciPy stack, set strategic direction for the organization, and managed budgets. Prior to Mozilla, Julie built the Health Data Science team at Twitter and is a subject matter expert at the intersection where trust and safety meets data. Throughout her career, Julie has been committed to improving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging by community-building. She founded Neustar Women in Technology, supporting women technologists both internally and externally; was a PyLadies San Francisco organizer; and co-founded MozAPI, the Asian Pacific Islander employee resource group at Mozilla.

Board Chair

Noor Aftab brings over a decade of experience driving tech innovation and digital transformation in the cloud and AI industries. As a Senior Program Manager at Amazon, she leads strategic customer engagements for the Amazon S3 program and builds Generative AI solutions to enhance productivity and customer success. Noor has spearheaded speaker programs for AWS’s largest events, including re:Invent, AWS Summits, re:Inforce, and Pi Day, delivering program excellence while championing diversity. She is a PyData Global reviewer, ensuring high-quality, inclusive proposals, and has mentored globally, including at NASA Space Apps and hackathons, where she upholds Codes of Conduct to create respectful and inclusive spaces. With expertise in data science, analytics, and program leadership, Noor is committed to building equitable, innovative, and thriving tech communities.

Board Secretary

Mridul Seth is a scientific software developer at the European Spallation Source ERIC, where he focuses on creating tools for neutron science. Over the years, he has contributed to several NumFOCUS projects, including NetworkX, Econ-ARK, Scientific Python, and various initiatives within the open-source scientific ecosystem. Reflecting on NumFOCUS’s progress over the past decade, Mridul recognizes its significant achievements in gaining and maintaining a critical presence within the wider scientific open-source community. As a candidate for the administrative board, Mridul is committed to helping sustain this momentum and securing a robust future for NumFOCUS and its projects. He believes his expertise and collective networks within the ecosystem can support the organization in setting strategic plans. By joining the board, Mridul aims to leverage his experience and passion to further strengthen NumFOCUS and its impact on the scientific open-source community.

Andy Terrel received his PhD in computer science at the University of Chicago in 2010. His major emphasis of research has been on the automation of numerical methods on high-performance computing resources. To this end, he has provided numerous contributions to a wide variety of open source projects, including the popular FEniCS project and SymPy. Dr. Terrel has held roles at universities, government laboratories, and several companies. In all of these roles, Dr. Terrel has been an expert in HPCcomputing as well as an advocate for the open source software movement. Dr. Terrel has served as chair and organizer of many scientific computing conferences including SciPy Conference, FEniCS Conference, HPC^3, and Scientific Software Days. He is an active contributor and reviewer to several scientific computing journals, in addition to being a past NumFOCUS Board Member.

Francesca van Doorn is the Director of Finance and Operations at Windward Fund, a nonprofit fiscal sponsor supporting environmental science and advocacy projects. In this role, she oversees financial operations and provides strategic guidance for a large and complex portfolio of fiscally sponsored initiatives. Previously, Francesca served as Financial Services Director at Arabella Advisors, where she supported nonprofit and philanthropic organizations through outsourced operational and financial services. She brings deep expertise in nonprofit financial management, grants administration, compliance, and governance across both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) organizations. Francesca’s experience managing large fiscal sponsor organizations and navigating the financial, legal, and ethical considerations of mission-driven work positions her to contribute meaningfully to NumFOCUS’s financial and operational leadership

Dr. James A. Bednar is the Director of Professional Services at Anaconda, Inc., leading a team of developers supporting a suite of open source scientific software projects. He founded the HoloViz project, adopted as a fiscally sponsored NumFOCUS project in 2023, and manages its Datashader, Param, and Colorcet packages. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Edinburgh, where he led the Doctoral Training Centre for Neuroinformatics and published over 50 scientific papers. James has over 20 years of experience on academic journal review boards and has been active in the SciPy community for more than 15 years, contributing through reviewing, speaking, and tutorials. His extensive experience in founding, leading, and managing open source projects and academic initiatives equips him to bring strategic and technical insight to the NumFOCUS Board of Directors.

A software engineer based in Japan, Tetsuo Koyama has a strong interest in scientific computing and visualization using computer graphics. As one of the primary developers of the PyVista project, he is deeply engaged in advancing open-source tools and technologies. His passion for open-source conference management and community support is reflected in his roles on the SciPy Conference management staff and as a volunteer for the NumFOCUS Election Committee.

Juan Nunez-Iglesias has been an active contributor to scientific open source since 2012, serving on the steering councils of two NumFOCUS-sponsored projects, scikit-image and napari. His dedication to open-source sustainability has been a focus for several years, highlighted by his co-organization of the “Funding Open Source” birds-of-a-feather session at SciPy 2019.

Jacob Schreiber brings over a decade of experience in the open-source ecosystem, combining technical expertise with a deep commitment to community-driven software development. As a core developer for scikit-learn and the creator of several widely-used software packages, including apricot, pomegranate, tangermeme, and ledidi, Jacob’s contributions span general-purpose tools and specialized software for the genomics community. Many of these projects have been bolstered by NumFOCUS Small Development Grants, with the resulting features playing a pivotal role in their success. His efforts have earned him recognition, including the Stanford Open Science Innovator Award, and he has shared his work through dozens of talks at conferences such as PyData, ODSC, and SciPy. Additionally, Jacob has translated research-focused projects like tfmodisco-lite and bpnet-lite into user-friendly production code.

Sophia Yang is the Head of Developer Relations at Mistral AI, where she oversees developer education, ecosystem partnerships, and community engagement. A passionate advocate for the open-source Python and AI community, Sophia has contributed to numerous open-source projects and frequently speaks at events promoting open-source initiatives. Her longstanding commitment to NumFOCUS includes serving on the steering committee for the HoloViz project, participating in the project incubator team and small development grants review committee, and co-chairing SciPy tutorials and PyData Global. Dedicated to fostering community growth and learning, Sophia is eager to continue advancing open-source and supporting NumFOCUS’s mission.

Sanket Verma has been an integral part of the NumFOCUS and PyData community for over eight years, championing the growth of PyData culture across India. As the leader of PyData Delhi, he organized India’s first PyData conference in 2017, which catalyzed the formation of numerous PyData chapters across the country. Since then, he has co-chaired six PyData conferences (Delhi and Global), organized over 40 meetups, and raised more than $300,000 to support NumFOCUS projects, earning the NumFOCUS Community Leadership Award in 2022. Currently, Sanket leads open-source initiatives for Zarr, a NumFOCUS-sponsored project, and serves on the SPEC and OSSci steering committees. His extensive experience spans governance, infrastructure support, contributor engagement, and event organization, equipping him to address the challenges of the open-source ecosystem and advance its growth effectively.