Advisory Board Highlight: Fernando Pérez
The creator of IPython and Jupyter joins Valency as an advisor.
It is a pleasure to announce Fernando Pérez as an advisor to Valency. Fernando is a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, the director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Many of you know him as the creator of IPython and Jupyter, an early supporter of MyST, and as one of the most important figures in data science over the last two decades. Nearly every practitioner in the field has been shaped by his influence, the tools he’s helped build, and the way that he’s educated the community. Fernando joins our advisory board first and foremost for his deep commitment to reproducible scientific workflows and his thinking on where science and scientific communication are headed.
As an early adopter of Python in my scientific workflow and in my teaching, it was only natural for me to want to meet my heroes, like Fernando, who are making this happen. We got introduced through a mutual friend circa 2008, and that connection blossomed into a productive scientific, administrative, and technical relationship (in addition to a full-blown friendship). We were co-PIs on the Moore-Sloan grant that became the seed for BIDS, we’ve written papers together on AI for time series, and we’ve co-advised students. When Fernando won the Free Software Foundation Award in 2013, I wrote in a blog then: “He is one of the most thoughtful, generous, and caring people I know and an absolute pleasure to work with.” This is still true 13 years later.
Fernando has been thinking deeply about the AI acceleration of science, and is the co-founder of a materials science company, AIMATX, which is pushing the frontier of metal-organic frameworks and covalent organic frameworks to help solve major industrial-scale problems.
In this video, you can hear Fernando talk about his career trajectory from a physicist to ecosystem tool builder to professor. Fernando has been with us since the company’s inception, offering honest, strategic, and technical feedback. We’re so happy to continue on our journey with him.
Please drop me or Fernando an email if you’d like to learn more!
