Fernando Pérez received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Colorado and then worked on numerical algorithm development at the Applied Mathematics Dept. at the same university. He now works as a scientist at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on the development of new analysis methods for brain imaging problems and high-level scientific computing tools.

Towards the end of his graduate studies, he became involved with the development of Python tools for scientific computing. He started the open source IPython project in 2001 when looking for a more efficient interactive workflow for everyday scientific tasks. He continues to lead the IPython project along with a growing team of talented developers. He also is a member of the core matplotlib development team, and has contributed to numpy, scipy, sympy, mayavi and other Python projects.

He is a regular speaker on topics related to scientific computing in Python, having taught workshops at multiple institutions in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe. He is a member of the Python Software Foundation.

When not glued to a computer, he tries to spend as much time as possible with his wife outdoors hiking and backpacking, as well as climbing rocks and mountains.

For more details, please see his website.