Kyle Barbary

Hello! I'm a data scientist at Zymergen. Zymergen creates novel materials using microorganisms. We do this using a combination of rational genetic edits and high-throughput testing to determine which edits worked and which didn't. As a data scientist, I build models to separate signal from noise and find the successful needle in the haystack of all our attempted edits.

Astronomy

Before becoming a data scientist in 2018, I got a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley in 2011, where I studied supernova cosmology under Saul Perlmutter. I was later a Director's Fellow at Argonne National Lab, a Data Science Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and until late 2017, a Project Scientist in the Physics Department at UC Berkeley.

During my astronomy career, I worked with large data sets from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Dark Energy Survey, and the Nearby Supernova Factory, employing optimization and sampling techniques to model data. I also wrote a bunch of open-source astronomy and statistics software in Python, Julia and C, much of which I continue to maintain. As part of BIDS, I investigated ways to make it easier for scientists to use programming tools to accomplish their research.

There's a bit more detail on my astronomy research here.

Publications

I'm an author of about 30 peer-reviewed journal articles in astronomy and physics. Here are a few highlights:

K. Barbary. SEP: Source Extractor as a library. Journal of Open Source Software, 1:6, October 2016. [ JOSS ]
K. Barbary, et al. (The Supernova Cosmology Project). The Hubble Space Telescope Cluster Supernova Survey. II. The Type Ia Supernova Rate in High-redshift Galaxy Clusters. ApJ, 745:32, January 2012. [ arXiv | ADS ]
K. Barbary, et al. (The Supernova Cosmology Project). The Hubble Space Telescope Cluster Supernova Survey. VI. The Volumetric Type Ia Supernova Rate. ApJ, 745:31, January 2012. [ arXiv | ADS ]
K. Barbary, et al. (The Supernova Cosmology Project). Discovery of an Unusual Optical Transient with the Hubble Space Telescope. ApJ, 690:1358-1362, January 2009. [ arXiv | ADS ]

For a complete list of publications, see this ADS query.

Outdoors

I'm an avid skier, cyclist and backpacker. See more of what I get up to on Instagram.