Professor Matt Craig is a core contributor among hundreds of volunteers worldwideto receive the 2025 AAS Berkely Prize
MSUM Professor Matt Craig is a core contributor among more than 500 volunteers worldwide to be recognized with the 2025 Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy.
The Berkeley Prize has been awarded annually by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) since 2011. It is supported by a New York Community Trust grant and includes a monetary award and an invitation to present at the AAS January 2025 meeting.
The Prize recognizes astronomers and scientists for their collaboration in supporting the Astropy Project, a worldwide effort started in 2011 to create free, open-source software for astronomy using the Python programming language. It offers a comprehensive, unified library of tools for astronomers to undertake tasks critical for research.
Astropy is vital to the global astronomy community, serving as essential infrastructure. Astropy has helped make countless cosmic discoveries, assisting everyone from new astronomy students to large multibillion-dollar observatories. The impact of Astropy on scientific discoveries is immeasurable.
“Award recognition for the Astropy Collaboration is long overdue,” said AAS Senior Vice President Grant Tremblay. “Astropy is a major research-enabling piece of infrastructure underpinning the field of astronomy worldwide.”
Dr. Craig made his first official code contribution to the primary Astropy Project in October 2013, working on the “coordinated” package ccdproc used to calibrate images from cameras. Since then, he’s been a lead developer or co-lead on that project, which is widely used by observatories worldwide and in space to work with astronomical images.
He was part of the committee that wrote The Astropy Project Governance Charter and has been a voting member since its inception in 2021. Craig has attended all but one of the annual Astropy coordination meetings since 2017, with his highest-profile leadership role serving on the five-person Coordination Committee that makes decisions for the project.
“Getting involved with the Astropy Project is one of the best professional decisions I’ve made,” Craig said. “The most satisfying thing about being involved in a project like this is working regularly with passionate, intelligent folks to meet a shared goal. I’ve learned how to work effectively with other people on remote projects and still get a thrill when I hear about another science group that uses Astropy in some way.”
A significant impact of Craig’s involvement with the Astropy Collaboration is the opportunity to engage with other large Python projects and to bring that knowledge to the classroom.
“My work with Astropy has enriched the undergraduate experience in our majors at MSUM. We use Astropy in our astronomy courses, including classes open to non-majors,” Craig said. “It has been gratifying to see the various strands of these professional activities weave into a coherent whole.”
Most recently, Craig was at the Dakota Nights Astronomy Festival at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. “The ranger who introduced me before my talk had recently graduated with an astronomy major from a university in Virginia and had (unexpected) glowing praise for Astropy in her introduction,” Craig said.
The Astropy Project is the foundation on which almost all astronomy-related Python software is written. Craig said papers describing Astropy were recently recognized as being in the top one percent of cited papers.
About the Astropy Collaboration
The Astropy Collaboration consists of hundreds of volunteer contributors worldwide and is managed by 45 voting members. The core Astropy library contains over 280,000 lines of code written by more than 450 contributors. This is supplemented by an ever-growing ecosystem of astronomy-specific software tools that can be used with the core Astropy library. With the rise in popularity of Python in the astronomy community over the past decade, Astropy has become one of the dominant tools in the profession, used by tens of thousands of people.
About the Lancelot M. Berkeley-New York Community Trust Prize
The Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize includes a monetary award and an invitation to give the closing plenary lecture at the AAS winter meeting. The Berkeley Prize will be accepted on behalf of the Astropy Collaboration by Coordination Committee members Erik Tollerud (Space Telescope Science Institute), Clara Brasseur (University of St. Andrews), and Kelle Cruz (CUNY Hunter College and American Museum of Natural History). They will give the prize lecture at the 245th AAS meeting.