Hello! I'm Jacob, a software and controls engineer specializing in adaptive optics, with a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics. I build real-time systems for astronomy and enjoy building and collaborating on open-source tools for the field.

Contact: jacobataylor7@gmail.com · ORCID: 0000-0002-6356-567X

AO Software Engineer, W. M. Keck Observatory · 2025–present

I lead the real-time control (RTC) platform for STRATA, the upcoming adaptive optics facility upgrade for the Keck I telescope. I also develop and maintain the software stacks for the Keck I and Keck II AO systems and their lasers, supporting the HAKA upgrade on Keck II and the KAPA upgrade on Keck I.

My work includes modernizing and sustaining complex, long-lived observatory systems, as well as integrating cameras, motion stages, filter wheels, and optomechanical hardware into AO systems. If it touches the AO system, and needs software, I'm there!

PhD, Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto · 2024

My doctoral thesis focused on adaptive optics and real-time control, including adaptive-secondary-mirror calibration, AI-enhanced control, eAPD infrared camera characterization, and AO bench design.

I’m passionate about building open-source tools that make adaptive optics and scientific software more accessible to the community. These projects grew from that work and are intended to be useful, approachable building blocks for others.

• pyRTC — an open-source adaptive optics real-time control toolkit in Python, designed to combine a simple interface with high-performance control.
• pyturb — fast, GPU-optional atmospheric turbulence and phase-screen generation for adaptive optics.
• aobasis — a library for generating and working with adaptive-optics modal basis sets, including Zernike, KL, zonal, and Hadamard modes.
• pyshmem — low-latency shared-memory streams for NumPy arrays and CUDA-backed PyTorch tensors.
• shmpipeline — a framework for building and managing high-performance CPU/GPU shared-memory compute pipelines.
• getframes — realistic synthetic camera frames for scientific imaging and image-processing pipelines.