Fernando Pérez (scientist)

Fernando Pérez (scientist) is a Colombian-American researcher and software developer known for creating IPython and co-founding Project Jupyter. He is a prominent figure in scientific computing and open-source software, connecting communities around Python (programming language), Julia (programming language), and R (programming language) and influencing tools used across National Aeronautics and Space Administration, European Organization for Nuclear Research, and academic institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

Early life and education

Pérez was born in Colombia and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia), later completing a Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley under advisors affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and collaborating with researchers at The Alan Turing Institute and Berkeley Lab. During his studies he worked alongside scholars connected to MIT Media Lab, Columbia University, and research groups at Princeton University and Harvard University that focus on scientific computing, numerical analysis, and high-performance computing.

Career and research

Pérez began his career contributing to projects at the intersection of interactive computing and reproducible research, collaborating with teams at Google, Microsoft Research, and IBM Research. He developed tools for interactive computing adopted by researchers at CERN, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His research spans interactive workflows used in laboratories tied to Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Human Genome Project, and initiatives at Broad Institute. He has held positions at University of California, Berkeley, worked with companies like Continuum Analytics (now Anaconda, Inc.), and engaged with foundations such as Mozilla Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and Gates Foundation on open science infrastructure.

Contributions to open source and Jupyter

Pérez created the original IPython project, which evolved into Project Jupyter, a multi-language platform powering JupyterLab and the Jupyter Notebook interface. Project Jupyter supports kernels for Python (programming language), Julia (programming language), R (programming language), Scala, Ruby (programming language), and many others, and is used by organizations including Netflix, Spotify, Bloomberg L.P., National Institutes of Health, and European Space Agency. He co-founded governance structures linked to NumFOCUS and engaged with the Python Software Foundation to foster community-driven development. His efforts connect to reproducibility standards promoted by IEEE, Association for Computing Machinery, and projects such as Binder (service), nbconvert, Voila (software), and the JupyterHub deployment used in courses at Harvard University, Yale University, University of Oxford, and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Awards and recognition

Pérez has received recognition from organizations including ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and Python Software Foundation. He was honored in lists and awards by Nature (journal), Science (journal), and recognitions tied to Open Source Initiative and Free Software Foundation. Institutions such as MIT Technology Review, Forbes, Wired (magazine), and The New York Times have profiled his work. He has been invited to speak at venues like PyCon, SciPy, Strata Data Conference, OSCON, and symposia at Royal Society and National Academy of Sciences.

Selected publications and talks

Pérez has authored and co-authored influential papers and talks presented at conferences including International Conference on Machine Learning, NeurIPS, International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and SIGPLAN workshops. Notable outputs include writings on interactive computing cited alongside work by Guido van Rossum, Bjarne Stroustrup, Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and collaborations with contributors from NumPy, SciPy, pandas (software), Matplotlib, and IPython kernel developers. He has delivered keynote addresses at Strata Data Conference, PyData, Open Source Summit, and invited lectures at Stanford University, University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and University of Toronto.

Category:Computer scientists Category:Open-source people Category:Colombian scientists