Hello! I'm Jacob, a controls and software engineer with a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics. I specialize in precision control systems for astronomical instrumentation, with experience spanning adaptive optics, real-time control, state estimation, scientific software, and spacecraft fine guidance.

I build precision control systems for astronomical instruments, from ground-based adaptive optics to spacecraft fine guidance. Today, I develop the control architecture that stabilizes the line of sight of the Cosmic space telescope; previously, I built real-time adaptive-optics and observatory software at the W. M. Keck Observatory.

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

Controls Engineer, Cosmic Frontier Labs · 2026–present

I develop the fine-guidance control system for the Cosmic Frontier Space Telescope, targeting 50 milliarcseconds of line-of-sight stabilization using a high-precision gyroscope and fast steering mirror.

My work focuses on control-law design, state estimation and sensor fusion, disturbance rejection, system modeling, simulation, and hardware-in-the-loop validation. The goal is to turn noisy, bandwidth-limited measurements into precise, deterministic actuation while rejecting spacecraft disturbances and maintaining an extremely stable optical line of sight.

AO Software Engineer, W. M. Keck Observatory · 2025–2026

I worked on the software and real-time control systems supporting the Keck I and Keck II adaptive-optics facilities. I led development of the real-time control platform for STRATA, the planned adaptive-optics facility upgrade for the Keck I telescope, and developed and maintained software supporting the HAKA upgrade on Keck II and KAPA upgrade on Keck I.

My work included modernizing complex, long-lived observatory software systems and integrating cameras, motion stages, filter wheels, detectors, and other optomechanical hardware into operational AO systems.

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 predictive control, eAPD infrared camera characterization, and adaptive-optics test-bench development.

I’m passionate about building open-source tools for real-time control, adaptive optics, scientific computing, and high-performance instrumentation. These projects grew from that work and are intended to provide 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.