Mark Galassi is a physicist, computer scientist, and contributor to the

Free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

movement. He was born in Manhattan, grew up in France and Italy, and lives in

Santa Fe, New Mexico Santa Fe ( ; , Spanish for 'Holy Faith'; tew, Oghá P'o'oge, Tewa for 'white shell water place'; tiw, Hulp'ó'ona, label=Tiwa language, Northern Tiwa; nv, Yootó, Navajo for 'bead + water place') is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. ...

Education

Galassi studied at the Liceo Classico Giuseppe Parini, graduating in 1983. He completed his BA in physics at

Reed College Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at ...

in 1986. He has credited various aspects of the college for launching his career, including learning to write software from fellow student

Keith Packard Keith Packard (born April 16, 1963) is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the l ...

and others who taught informal classes in the Reed College Paideia classes. He then completed his Ph.D. in physics in 1992 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook under Martin Roček.

Work and research

Galassi works in the Space Science and Applications group at the

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

as a research scientist. In Los Alamos he has worked in: *

Gamma-ray burst In gamma-ray astronomy, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are immensely energetic explosions that have been observed in distant galaxies. They are the most energetic and luminous electromagnetic events since the Big Bang. Bursts can last from ten milli ...

High Energy Transient Explorer High Energy Transient Explorer 1 (HETE-1) was a NASA astronomical satellite with international participation (mainly Japan and France). History The concept of a satellite capable of multi-wavelength observations of gamma-ray bursts (GRB) wa ...

and

HETE-2 High Energy Transient Explorer 2 (HETE-2; also known as Explorer 79) was a NASA astronomical satellite with international participation (mainly Japan and France). The satellite bus for the first HETE-1 was designed and built by AeroAstro, Inc. ...

satellites, the Raptor telescope suite, the

Swift Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to: * SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks ** SWIFT code * Swift (programming language) * Swift (bird), a family of birds It may also refer to: Organizations * SWIFT, ...

satellite. * Muon tomography: Cosmic-ray muon tomography to detect high-Z materials. *

Nuclear nonproliferation Nuclear proliferation is the spread of nuclear weapons, fissionable material, and weapons-applicable nuclear technology and information to nations not recognized as " Nuclear Weapon States" by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Wea ...

: Scientific methods to address the spread of nuclear materials and weapons. *

Machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

: The Genie feature extraction system. In the 1980s he also worked for

Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent ...

on the 11000 series oscilloscope,

Cygnus Solutions Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software. Its tagline was: ''Making free software affordable''. For years, employee ...

(now part of

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

) working on

Guile Guile may refer to: * Astuteness, deception. * GNU Guile, an implementation of the Scheme programming language * Guile (''Street Fighter''), a video game character from the ''Street Fighter'' series * Guile (''Chrono Cross''), a video game chara ...

and

eCos The Embedded Configurable Operating System (eCos) is a free and open-source real-time operating system intended for embedded systems and applications which need only one process with multiple threads. It is designed to be customizable to preci ...

Free/open-source contributions

Galassi has been involved in the Free and open-source software movement since 1984 He designed the

GNU Scientific Library The GNU Scientific Library (or GSL) is a software library for numerical computations in applied mathematics and science. The GSL is written in C; wrappers are available for other programming languages. The GSL is part of the GNU Project and is d ...

together with James Theiler. He was also an early contributor to

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

, and designed and led development of the Dominion world simulation game. He has served on the board of directors of the

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is an organization that provides a non-profit home and infrastructure support for free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member pro ...

from its inception until the present time. He also was chair of the board until 2022.

Educational initiatives

Galassi has been training students since the 1980s, teaching them in research methods, with emphasis on using only free/open-source software tools. After decades of developing this pipeline, in 2019, he conceived of and co-founded the Institute for Computing in Research, a non-profit which trains high school students to do research, deeply rooted in free/open-source software. The Institute, founded in

in 2019, offers a research internship modeled after the Los Alamos internship program. It has since spread to

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous co ...

in 2021 and to

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...

in 2022. In 2021 Galassi was awarded the inaugural Los Alamos medal for community relations and the Santa Fe New Mexican "Ten Who Made a Difference" award, both for the creation of the student pipeline that culminates in the Institute for Computing in Research.

References

External links

Personal pageGoogle scholar page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Galassi, Mark 1965 births Living people GNU people Linux people Reed College alumni Stony Brook University alumni Free software programmers Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel