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

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

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

Santa Fe, New Mexico Santa Fe ( ; , literal translation, lit. "Holy Faith") is the capital city, capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico, and the county seat of Santa Fe County. With over 89,000 residents, Santa Fe is the List of municipalities in New Mexico, fourt ...

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 college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland, Portland, Oregon, E ...

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 ...

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 Martin Roček is a professor of theoretical physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a member of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. He received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1975 and 1979. ...

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 Laboratory, laboratories of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy ...

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

Gamma-ray burst In gamma-ray astronomy, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are extremely energetic events occurring in distant Galaxy, galaxies which represent the brightest and most powerful class of explosion in the universe. These extreme Electromagnetic radiation, ele ...

High Energy Transient Explorer 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. ...

and HETE-2 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 * SWIF ...

satellite. *

Muon tomography Muon tomography or muography is a technique that uses cosmic ray muons to generate two or three-dimensional images of volumes using information contained in the Coulomb scattering of the muons. Since muons are much more deeply penetrating than X- ...

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

Nuclear nonproliferation Nuclear proliferation is the spread of nuclear weapons to additional countries, particularly those not recognized as nuclear-weapon states by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, commonly known as the ''Non-Proliferation T ...

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

Machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

: 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 c ...

on the 11000 series oscilloscope,

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

(now part of

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

) working on

Guile Guile or Guilé may refer to: Fictional characters * Guile (''Street Fighter''), a video game character from the ''Street Fighter'' series * Guile, a video game character from ''Chrono Cross'' People * Daniel Guile (1814–1882), British trade ...

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 The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets these requirements, ...

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 (programming language), C; wrappers are available for other programming languages. The GSL is part of ...

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, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

, 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. (also known as "Conservancy") is an organization that provides a Nonprofit organization, non-profit home, infrastructure support, and legal support for free software, free and open source software projects. The ...

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 the List of cities in Oregon, most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon, located in the Pacific Northwest region. Situated close to northwest Oregon at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, ...

in 2021 and to

Austin, Texas Austin ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat and most populous city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and W ...

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