Kurt Hill

Kurt Hill has worked in the software engineering industry since 2020, when they began working at Pyka as a Software Engineer. Kurt'srole includes developing onboard and support software for autonomous aircraft, with experience in most aspects of the software stack from device drivers to UI app development, specializing in aircraft spatial awareness via sensor fusion and mapping.

Prior to their current role, Hill worked at the University of Colorado Boulder from 2014-2020. During this time, they were a Research Assistant, working on three different international experimental collaborations: PHENIX and sPHENIX at RHIC, and ATLAS at the LHC. Hill also participated in four different data taking runs, monitoring detector performance and data quality, and contributed effort to several analyses resulting in publications, including being lead investigator for two measurements, and developed reconstruction software for the up and coming sPHENIX experiment. Hill also acted as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Hill's work experience also includes a Junior Specialist role at the University of California, Davis from 2010-2014. As part of the STAR collaboration, they studied the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory by successfully measuring the suppression of Upsilon meson production from QGP effects in Au-Au collisions at 200 GeV/NN. Hill was responsible for the calculation of detector efficiencies used in the yield measurement.

Kurt Hill obtained a Bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of California, Davis in 2011, followed by a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the same institution. Kurt then pursued a Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Physics from the University of Colorado Boulder, which they completed in 2020. Additionally, Hill obtained two certifications from Coursera in December 2019: Applied Plotting, Charting & Data Representation in Python and Introduction to Data Science in Python.