Michele Simionato

Starting from October 2012 I have been an employee of GEM, a non-profit foundation specialized on earthquakes and seismic risk assessment. I am now the maintainer of the Openquake Engine and since March 2014 I have been working full time on it.

Before that I had a long and variegated professional history.

I started out as a Theoretical Physicist, with a master degree from Padua University, with a specialization in Astrophysics and Cosmology. At the time I was working mostly on supergravity theories, differential geometry and symmetries in Quantum Field Theories. Then I got a Ph. D. about the Renormalization of Quantum Field Theory from the University of Parma. At that point I moved on to Paris where I spent three years and a half working on both Equilibrium and Out of Equilibrium Quantum Field Theory. Later, I moved again, this time to the United States, and I spent a couple of years at the University of Pittsburgh, as a research associate, with some dabbling also in the Early Universe Cosmology. At that time I decided that it was time for a more radical change, so I quit Physics and moved to software development.

I rapidly became an expert on Python and I started writing papers on it, especially the famous ones about [metaclasses] (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pymeta/index.html) (published by IBMDeveloperWorks) and the method resolution order (published by Guido Van Rossum himself on the Python site). I went back to Italy and for a couple of years I worked as an independent Python consultant. I also spent some time working with Plone and several Web technologies. I have become one of the founders of the Italian Python Association. I was finally hired by a financial firm in Milan and spent 7 years working with databases and web applications in the field of financial risk assessment. In 2008 I went back to write technical articles, first for the Italian web fanzine Stacktrace and then for [my blog] (http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=micheles) where I wrote the infamous Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland.

PS: usually I do not dress up as nicely as in the picture!