Branch Manager, JWST NIRISS

November 2025 - Present

Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD

• Plan and prioritize NIRISS work to meet the deadlines and tasks considering available skills, expertise, and resource constraints, and help remove obstacles as necessary.

• Supervise direct reports and track their work and performance, meeting regularly to ensure tasks are on track and career goals are being met.

• Help facilitate operational and instrument calibration updates, including implementation of new detector capabilities and coordinating updates to data processing subsystems.

• Provide updates on NIRISS work and status in high level meetings with stakeholders, including the JWST User Committee meeting and the JWST Monthly Status Report meetings with NASA GSFC project leads.

• Continue management trainings to sharpen skills and better support an instrument team in a complex, multi-mission environment.

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Branch Deputy, JWST NIRCam

January 2023 - November 2025

Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD

• Helped plan and prioritize NIRCam work to meet the deadlines and tasks considering available skills, expertise, and resource constraints, and helped remove obstacles as necessary.

• Supervised direct reports and tracked their work and performance, meeting regularly to ensure tasks are on track and career goals are being met.

• Served as interim NIRCam branch manager and helped facilitate several changes during that time, including hiring new STScI Fellows, implementing persistence mitigation procedures, and enabling short wavelength grism time series spectroscopy mode.

• Provided updates on NIRCam work and status in multiple high level meetings with stakeholders, including the JWST User Committee meeting and the JWST Monthly Status Report meetings with NASA GSFC project leads.

• Participated in several management trainings to learn best practices for managing teams and serving in leadership roles.

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Principal Staff Scientist, JWST NIRCam

February 2025 - Present

Senior Staff Scientist

May 2021 - January 2025

Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD

• Supported NIRCam through launch and commissioning by working shifts, monitoring telemetry, and checking flight data for commissioning programs.

• Helped track, triage, and monitor flight data and operational pipeline issues during and after the transition to normal operations, and performed regular science calibration pipeline testing and validation.

• Monitored execution of the NIRCam darks commissioning and calibration programs and supported analysis for several other programs, including image quality verification and astrometric calibration.

• Performed regular user support tasks, including supporting the JWST Help Desk, writing documentation in JDox, and performing proposal reviews to help PIs optimize the use of the instrument.

• Participated in JWebbinars, JWST Office Hours, and JWST Calibration Workshops to help the community process and analyze their data using the calibration pipeline and data analysis tools.

• Supported several working groups, including leading the JWST Data Management System Working Group, the Calibration Working Group, the JDox working group, and the JWST Help Desk Working Group.

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Data Management System Working Group (DMSWG) Lead

November 2018 - December 2023

Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD

• Implemented an automated calibration pipeline testing infrastructure to improve the efficiency of regular pipeline testing and take advantage of Confluence and Jira project management tools.

• Worked to improve communication between working groups with overlapping goals and projects by establishing new communication procedures, setting up regular meetings, and ensuring follow-up with stakeholders.

• Coordinated calibration pipeline testing campaigns, collecting feedback and input from the instrument branches and compiling the final reports for stakeholders.

• Coordinated efforts to implement new calibration algorithms and develop new reference files to be delivered by the instrument branches with each software release.

• Worked with the teams to implement and practice a new process of prioritizing pipeline development work captured in Jira tickets to ensure that the most critical needs and issues are addressed.

• Organized the pipeline workshop for the JWST First Science Results Conference to help attendees understand, install, and run the pipeline for primary science modes.

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Staff Scientist II, JWST NIRCam

March 2016 - April 2021

Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD

• Reduced and analyzed data from ground testing for instrument characterization and the creation of calibration and parameter reference files.

• Continued to lead the pipeline testing effort and migrate NIRCam validation tests over to a Jupyter notebook infrastructure, working with other team experts to ensure that the pipeline is performing well for all modes.

• Served as instrument or analysis lead for several NIRCam commissioning programs, including darks and image quality verification.

• Performed regular user support tasks including proposal reviews and answering JWST Help Desk tickets.

• Supported several working groups, including the JWST Data Management System Working Group, the Calibration Working Group, the JDox working group, and the JWST Help Desk Working Group.

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Lab Assistant II, NuSTAR Observatory

February 2014 - December 2015

Columbia University Astrophysics Laboratory, New York, NY

• Reduced and analyzed data from NuSTAR, XMM, and Chandra X-ray observatories using Python and X-ray data analysis programs (NuSTARDAS, CIAO, NASA's HEASARC software packages, Xspec, Sherpa)

• Simulated observations to determine optimal observation times, dates, and optical axis positions for nearby intermediate polars (IPs), unidentified gamma ray sources, a young massive star cluster, and Jupiter

• Performed timing, morphological, and/or spectral analysis of high-energy X-ray sources, including: a high-velocity neutron star, a magnetar, cataclysmic variable binaries, the Sgr B2 molecular cloud, unidentified gamma ray sources, Galactic center point sources, Galactic center diffuse X-ray emission, active galactic nuclei, and Jupiter

• Presented results of analysis at weekly meetings between researchers and contributed to several refereed research papers published in the Astrophysical Journal

• Mentored other students (high school and undergraduate) and provided guidance for their summer research projects

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Columbia University, New York, NY

December 2015

B.A., Physics

Operating Systems: UNIX, Linux, WINDOWS, Macintosh

Programming Languages: Python (Advanced), Latex (Advanced), Matlab, IDL, some C and C++, some HTML

Applications: NASA's HEASARC software packages, Matlab, LaTeX, Excel, MS Word, PowerPoint, Adobe Photoshop & Creative Cloud

Version Control and Project Management Systems: GitHub, Travis CI, Atlassian Jira and Confluence software

Data Analysis Software Packages and Tools: JWST Science Calibration Pipeline, CIAO, NuSTARDAS, ds9, Xspec (and other HEASARC software packages), Conda and Python packages including: Astropy, Photutils, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Pandas, Bokeh, Glue, Ginga

Proposal Planning Tools : JWST Astronomer's Proposal Tool, JWST Exposure Time Calculator, JWST Target Visibility Tool, JDox, MIRAGE simulator, STIPS

Research: Reducing and analyzing NuSTAR and Chandra observations, reducing and analyzing ground and simulated JWST observations, writing scientific papers in LaTeX, and presenting work at conferences and professional meetings

Lab Equipment: Oscilloscopes, digital voltmeters, spectrometers, vacuum systems, Raytheon's ECLIPSE telemetry monitoring system

Publications and Proceedings

Gardner, Jonathan P., et al., including Canipe, "The James Webb Space Telescope Mission." Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (2023).

Rigby, Jane, et al., including Canipe, "The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning." Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (2023).

Rieke, Marcia J., et al., including Canipe, "NIRCam Performance on JWST In Flight." Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (2023).

Schlawin, Everett, et al., including Canipe, "JWST NIRCam Defocused Imaging: Photometric Stability Performance and How It Can Sense Mirror Tilts." Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (2023).

Girard, Julien H., et al., including Canipe, "JWST/NIRCam coronagraphy: commissioning and first on-sky results." Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2022: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave. Vol. 12180. SPIE, 2022.

Girard, Julien H., et al, including Canipe, "Making good use of JWST's coronagraphs: tools and strategies from a user's perspective." Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2018: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter Wave. Vol. 10698. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2018.

Hailey, Charles J., et al., including Canipe, "Evidence for intermediate polars as the origin of the Galactic Center hard X-ray emission." The Astrophysical Journal 826.2 (2016): 160.

Hong, JaeSub, et al., including Canipe, "NuSTAR hard x-ray survey of the galactic center region. II. X-ray point sources." The Astrophysical Journal 825.2 (2016): 132.

Mori, Kaya, et al., including Canipe, "NuSTAR Hard X-ray Survey of the Galactic Center Region. I. Hard X-ray Morphology and Spectroscopy of the Diffuse Emission." The Astrophysical Journal 814.2 (2015): 94.

Peer-Reviewed Technical Reports

A. Canipe, "Test Report for Testing of Build 7.5 for the JWST Calibration Pipeline", JWST-STScI-007553 (2021)

A. Canipe, "Test Report for Testing of Build 7.3 for the JWST Calibration Pipeline", JWST-STScI-007041 (2019)

A. Canipe, "Test Report for Testing of Build 7.2 for the JWST Calibration Pipeline", JWST-STScI-006768 (2019)

M. Correnti, G. Sloan, A. Canipe, "Test Report for Testing of the Data Analysis Tools Build 5 Suite", JWST-STScI-006766 (2019)

A. Rest, A. Canipe, B. Hilbert, "Frame 0 Analysis for NIRCam Integrations", JWST-STScI-006203 (2018)

A. Canipe, "NIRCam Testing of Build 7.1 for the JWST Calibration Pipeline", JWST-STScI-006168 (2018)

A. Canipe, A. Rest, B. Hilbert, "A Comparison of Restframe Ground Filters Redshifted to JWST Filter Bandpasses", JWST-STScI-005769 (2017)

A. Canipe, M. Robberto, "Reference Files for an Updated NIRCam Non-linearity Correction Method", JWST-STScI-005711 (2017)

B. Hilbert, A. Canipe, B. Brooks, "NIRCam Testing of Build 7 for the JWST Calibration Pipeline", JWST-STScI-005718 (2017)

A. Canipe, M. Robberto, B. Hilbert, "A New Non-linearity Correction Method for NIRCam", JWST-STScI-005167 (2016)

A. Canipe, "NIRCam Non-linearity Correction Reference File Code Release", JWST-STScI-005518 (2016)

Acknowledgements

Perez, Kerstin, et al. "Extended hard-X-ray emission in the inner few parsecs of the Galaxy." Nature 520.7549 (2015): 646.

"JWST Science Data End-to-End Validation Framework." Poster presentation at the Astronomical Data Analysis and Software Systems Meeting by DMS working group. October 2019.

"Generating Realistic Coronagraphic Images of Point Source Detections with JWST's NIRCam and MIRI." Poster session at In the Spirit of Lyot 2019 conference given by JWST Coronagraphs Working Group. October 2019.

"A New Non-Linearity Correction Method for the JWST Near-Infrared Camera." Presentation at American Astronomical Society 230th Meeting. June 2017.

"A Hard X-ray Study of the Jovian Magnetosphere with NuSTAR." Presentation given by research group at American Astronomical Society 227th Meeting. January 2016.

"Investigating Complex Spectral Properties of Two Intermediate Polars." Presentation at Columbia University Astrofest. September 2014.

JWST Summer School, Baltimore, MD (2025): Supported the JWST Calibration Pipeline session of the inaugural summer school.

American Astronomical Society 245th Meeting, National Harbor, MD (2025): Supported the JWST Calibration Pipeline hands-on workshop and JWST Ask-an-Expert sessions

Greater IPAC Technology Symposium, Caltech/IPAC, Pasadena, CA (2023): Invited talk on the JWST Science Calibration Pipeline.

First Science Results from JWST, Baltimore, MD (2022): Organized and led the JWST Pipeline workshop.

American Astronomical Society 230th Meeting, Austin, TX (2017): Poster talk on non-linearity correction algorithm for JWST NIRCam.

JWST Workshop - Planning your JWST observations - [get set], Madrid, Spain (2017): Prepare materials for participants and assisted during sessions.

Kayli Glidic: Career mentoring, March 2023 - Present

Meera Desai (Barnard College, '18): Analysis of Galactic Center X-ray point sources, February 2015 - October 2015

Sonny An (High School): Analysis of Jupiter X-ray emission, June 2015 - August 2015

Thomas Choi (High School): Analysis of Galactic Center X-ray point sources, June 2015 - August 2015

• Space Astronomy Summer Program (SASP) application reviewer, 2022

• Speaker for the Maryland International School STEM outreach event, 2020

• Volunteer and session lead for JA-BizTown Engineering Simulation, 2018

• Invited speaker for Teen Science Cafe at Catawba Science Center, 2017

• Volunteer and session lead for JA-HCPSS Women in Engineering Day, 2017

• Managers Forum Advisory Board, Co-Chair, November 2024-Present

• Instruments Division Software Engineering Branch Manager hiring committee, June 2025

• Space Telescope Science Institute Fellowship hiring committee, October 2023-January 2024

• American Astronomical Society (2016-Present)

Provided upon request.