Francesco Benincasa, master of science in software engineering, is a software designer and developer. He is a GNU/Linux and Python expert and has vast experience in many other languages and applications. He has been using Python as the primary language for more than 10 years, together with JavaScript and frameworks such as Plone, Django, and JQuery.
He is interested in advanced web and network developing as well as scientific data manipulation, analysis, and visualization. Over the last few years, he has been using graphical Python libraries such as matplotlib/Basemap, scientific libraries such as NumPy/SciPy, Pandas, and PyTables, and scientific applications such as GrADS, NCO, and CDO.
He is currently working at the Earth Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (www.bsc.es) as a research support engineer. He is involved in projects such as the World Meteorological Organization Sand and Dust Storms Warning Advisory and Assessment System (http://sds-was.aemet.es/) and the Barcelona Dust Forecast Center (http://dust.aemet.es/).
He has already worked for Packt Publishing in the past as a reviewer for matplotlib Plotting Cookbook.
Wen-Wei Liao received his MSc in systems neuroscience from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. He is interested in the development of computational strategies to interpret the genomic and epigenomic data that is produced from high-throughput sequencing. He works as a computational science developer at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. More information regarding him can be found at http://wwliao.name/.
Nicolas P. Rougier is a researcher at INRIA (France), which is the French national institute for research in computer science and control. His research lies at the frontier between integrative and computational neuroscience, where he tries to understand higher brain functions using computational models. He also has experience in scientific visualization and has produced several tutorials (matplotlib tutorials, NumPy tutorials, and 100 NumPy exercices) as well as the popular Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures article.
Dr. Allen Chi-Shing Yu is a postdoctoral fellow who is currently working in the field of cancer genetics. He obtained his BSc degree in molecular biotechnology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2009 and a PhD degree in biochemistry at the same university in 2013. In 2010, Allen led the first team in CUHK to join MIT's prestigious International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. His team, a 2010 iGEM gold medalist, worked on using bacteria as an obfuscated massive data storage device. The project was widely covered by the media, including AFP, Engadget, PopSci, and Time, to name a few.
His thesis research primarily involves the characterization of novel bacterial strains that can use toxic fluoro-tryptophans, but not the canonical tryptophan, for propagation. The findings demonstrated that the genetic code is not an immutable construct despite billions of years of invariance. Soon after these microbial studies, he identified and characterized a novel marker that causes Spinocerebellar Ataxia (SCA), which is a group of diverse neurodegenerative disorders. This research about the novel SCA marker was recently published in the Journal of Medical Genetics. Recently, through the development of a tool that was used to detect viral integration events in human cancer samples (ViralFusionSeq), he entered the field of cancer genetics. As a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Nathalie Wong's lab, he is now taking part in the analysis of hepatocellular carcinoma using the data from the high-throughput sequencing of genomes and transcriptomes.