Travis Oliphant

My interests are wide and varied: religion, politics, economics, cognitive science, computers, mathematics, probability theory and people (in no particular order). Basically I love to read, write, and think about how things work. I spent a lot of time in academia --- until I realized that a) I needed more resources for my growing family and b) I wanted to influence how things were done today.

My professional life started with academic work in making better estimates of wind speed and direction from radio back-scatter from a satellite. After receiving B.S. and M.S. degrees from Brigham Young University in 1995, I moved to the Mayo Clinic to pursue an interest in biomedical engineering. I completed my Ph.D. in 2001 studying Ultrasound and MRI with Jim Greenleaf, Richard Ehman, and Armando Manduca. My project comprised making better estimates of stiffness from wave images taken with both MRI and Ultrasound. This work required taking numerical derivatives and doing other processing on large multi-dimensional images which stretched the computational tools available to me at the time. In 1997, I started using Python and this changed the direction of my life.

In 2001, I started a tenure-track position at BYU in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and enjoyed teaching probability theory, signal processing, electromagnetics, and inverse problems to students willing to endure my tests. I also directed the Biomedical Imaging Lab and worked on scanning impedance imaging.

During this time, however, I ended up writing more programs than papers, continuing my work with NumPy and SciPy which I began in 1997. This led invariably to a career in technical computing. I re-vamped Numeric Python during 2005 and released NumPy in 2006 with the help of several other community members. In 2007, I joined Enthought, and have worked as President since 2008.

SciPy came out of my work on Multipack which was released in 1999 as a collection of scientific libraries for Python. In 2001 it was combined with work from Pearu Peterson and Eric Jones and released to the world. I keep looking forward to the time I will be able to work more on SciPy again, but am beginning to realize that I may need to just continue to work to fund it.