Dr. Steven Berukoff

Steve's career has centered on the leadership and management of large scientific and technical projects. A particular focus has been working at the nexus of systems engineering, software and data engineering, and science, building projects' data and computing infrastructure and software, and working with complex teams to draft and effect processes and policies to steer projects forward. He is currently the Program Manager for the United States Extremely Large Telescope Program (US-ELTP), a joint initiative of the organizations building the Giant Magellan Telescope and Thirty Meter Telescope, and NSF's NOIRLab. In past roles, he led teams as a project manager and engineering director at the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), at the continental scale ecology project NEON, and at Datastax, an enterprise database company. 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, where he focused on studies of black hole dynamics in the Galactic Center and the thermal and magnetohydrodynamic environments where planet formation occurs.