Dr. Steven Berukoff

Steve's career has centered on the leadership and management of large scientific and technical projects of systems engineering, software and data engineering, and science, building projects' data and computing infrastructure and software, and working to draft and effect processes and policies to steer projects forward. He is currently a Data Systems Lead at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Science at the University of Colorado. In past roles, he was the Program Manager for the United States Extremely Large Telescope Program (US-ELTP), a joint initiative of the Giant Magellan Telescope, Thirty Meter Telescope, and NSF's NOIRLab; project manager and engineering director at the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) and at the continental scale ecology project NEON, and an engineering director at Datastax, an enterprise database company recently purchased by IBM. Early in his career, Steve wrote data analysis software for the LIGO gravitational wave observatory, which is still in use today in the hunt for elusive signals from deformed neutron stars. He has also worked as a consulting engineer, systems engineer, project manager, and CTO at multiple organizations that include startups, non-profits, and Fortune 500s. Steve earned a PhD in astrophysics from UCLA focusing on studies of black hole dynamics in the Galactic Center and the thermal and magnetohydrodynamic environments where planet formation occurs.