Richard Dubois - Science Computing Coordinator for Fermi's Large Area Telescope

Richard Dubois has managed the scientific computing enterprise for Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) since 2000. In this role, he has coordinated the development of the instrument simulation and event reconstruction code into a production system, as well as the large-scale automated processing systems for the science data which take the raw data and produce the photon descriptions used in science analysis.

On the astrophysical side, Richard has focused on microquasars - galactic analogues of the supermassive quasars - to learn about how the acceleration processes happen and how gamma ray energies connect to the cycles seen in the lower energy ranges.

Born in Montreal, Canada, Richard received his B.Sc. in physics at McGill University and Ph.D. in particle physics at the University of British Columbia. Richard became a post-doc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, Calif. in the early 1980s, working on the DELCO experiment (with Bill Atwood) and then the SLAC Large Detector (SLD), an experiment exploring the properties of the Z particle. By this time he was a staff scientist responsible for the scientific computing for SLD, valuable experience that was applied to Fermi.

In 2013, Richard joined LSST as Camera Computing Coordinator, including the new responsibility of curating all the test data associated with the assembly process to ensure their seamless availability for dark energy systematics studies for the DESC collaboration. Richard joined that collaboration in 2012 and is the lead for the computing modeling and infrastructure working group as well as Operations Coordinator. This is a whole new area of science for him, and Strong Lensing will be the initial foray into it.

To maintain sanity, Richard mixes in ultimate frisbee, stained glass work and kayaking.