Clément M.T. Robert (@neutrinoceros)
About me
I am a research software engineer, holding a PhD in astrophysicist. I am passionate about software development and maintenance, and an advocate for free open-source software.
Experience in software development and maintenance
I am currently under contract with the Astropy Project for which I provide user and developer support.
I am also a volunteer co-maintainer of several popular open source
libraries within the scientific Python landscape,
first and foremost yt (since 2019) and the
various parts of its ecosystem (unyt,
cmyt,
ewah_bool_utils), as well as
h5py (since 2024) and
cmasher (since 2023).
Within these organizations, I collaborate with many different actors (co-maintainers,
users, developers of dependencies and dependent code, …). astropy and yt integrate
and inter-operate with many other popular libraries in the ecosystem (most proeminently
numpy and matplotlib, but also each other). Maintaining this complex compatibility
network gave me the opportunity to collaborate (report, discuss, and fix problems) with
most of these actors.
In addition to contributing features and bug fixes, I volunteer my time to improve and maintain the health of the project via
- building and testing infrastructures
- packaging and distribution automation
- code quality (APIs consistency and user experience)
- documentation
Notable projects and pull requests
I wrote over 3000 pull requests and maintained a couple dozen projects of various sizes since I joined GitHub. Here’s a selected sample
- I rewrote 99% of yt’s gateway function to improve user experience
- During my post-doc, I wrote various tools to facilitate my daily tasks, which are all open source
- Other than projects I started, maintained or regularly participated in,
I have, most notably, successfully contributed patches and documentation to
matplotlib,numpy,cartopy,sympy,pyupgradeandCPython.
Academic experience
Post-doc (2020-2023)
I am currently employed as a contractual researcher at IPAG,
where I am collaborating with Geoffroy Lesur on the development of the GPU-accelerated
Magneto-Hydrodynamics (MHD), High Performance Computing (HPC) simulation code
Idefix. Idefix is written in C++ and powered
by the Kokkos library.
I developed a new physics module for Idefix*, to combine on-grid hydrodynamics with super-particles representing astrophysical “dust” (solid matter, not subject to pressure).
*: This module is not available in the public version of Idefix at the moment.
PhD in Astrophyics (2016-2020)
Doctorat en Sciences de la Terre et de L’Univers, Université de Nice, 2020
My thesis was supervised by Héloïse Méheut and François Ménard. I worked on hydrodynamics of planet-forming disks. Specifically, I studied the migration of giant planets via planet-disk interactions, and I worked on connecting simulations to observations in the context of dusty clumps formed by giant vortices.
I produced, developed, and analyzed hydrodynamics simulations with Fargo (C, then
C++) and MPI-AMRVAC (Fortran90). I used mcfost (Fortran90) to produce synthetic
observations of my models, using a glue code I developed in Python to automate the
conversion pipeline.
In addition to the features I needed for my own research, I contributed to all codes I used with tests, automation, and bug fixes.
Bibliography
The list of scientific publications, including my thesis, that I lead or contributed to, is currated on my orcid page (0000-0001-8629-7068).
Education
Master’s: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Master d’Astronomie, Astrophysique et navigation spatiale, Université Paris VII, 2016
Bachelor’s: Fundamental Physics
Licence de Physique Fondamentale, Université Paris VII, 2014
Preparatory classes
Physique & Science pour l’Ingénieur, Lycée Raspail (Paris), 2013 Physique, Chimie & Science pour l’Ingénieur, Lycée Lavoisier (Paris), 2011