Suffolk Reporter

Thomas Caswell, a computational scientist at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) and lead developer of Matplotlib, has been awarded a five-year $1.6 million grant from NASA. This funding will support the development and maintenance of Matplotlib and Cartopy, which are essential tools for data visualization and geospatial data analysis. These tools are widely used at NSLS-II, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

NASA has allocated $15.6 million in grants to 15 projects aimed at maintaining open-source tools crucial for its science community. Steve Crawford, program executive for Open Science implementation at NASA Headquarters in Washington, highlighted the importance of these projects: “The NASA science community’s excitement for this program demonstrates the need for sustained support and maintenance of open-source software."

The awards come under NASA's initiative to promote open science practices through its Research Opportunities for Space and Earth Science program. The funding is divided into foundational awards—supporting projects impacting multiple divisions—and sustainment awards—targeting specific divisions within the Science Mission Directorate.

Among the foundational awardees are NASA’s Ames Research Center with Ross Beyer leading efforts on stereo pipeline expansion; Caltech's Brigitta Sipocz focusing on Astroquery infrastructure; Cornell University's Ramin Zabih working on arXiv modernization; D. Cooley from Goddard Space Flight Center enabling SMD science with mission analysis tools; Thomas Caswell ensuring sustainability of Matplotlib and Cartopy; and Erik Tollerud investing in Astropy project development.

Sustainment award recipients include Cedric David from Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on river software sustainability; David Radice from Pennsylvania State University developing simulation infrastructure for astrophysics; Trent Hare from United States Geological Survey updating QGIS planetary features; Michael Starch from JPL enhancing F Prime documentation; Albert Shih from Goddard improving SunPy ecosystem consistency; Julia Kelliher from Triad National Security enhancing biological data analysis capabilities with EDGE Bioinformatics Platform; Daniel Baston from iSciences sustaining Geospatial Data Abstraction Library functionality; C Max Stevens from University of Maryland supporting Community Firn Model sustainability; and Dharhas Pothina from Quansight ensuring core scientific Python libraries' security and performance.

For further information about Brookhaven's involvement in this research initiative, contact Denise Yazak via email or phone.