Christopher Barker is an Oceanographer with the NOAA's Emergency Response Division. In that role, he provides scientific support to the responders to oil and chemical spills in US navigable waters. When not responding to spills, he develops software tools used for Hazmat response.

After graduating from UC Berkeley with a PhD in Coastal Engineering with a dissertation built on MATLAB, Chris discovered Python and Numeric, and never looked back. Since then he has been an active member of the Scipy and wxPython communities, and contributed to a number of Python based open source projects, and acted as a Google Summer of Code mentor.

In addition to his work at NOAA Chris has given talks at SciPy, PyCon and local meetings in Seattle, and is a Python Instructor for the University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education Program.