About

Chase Million is an astronomer and planetary scientist, archivist, software and systems engineer, project manager, and artist. He is the founder and CEO of Million Concepts, a research and software company that builds systems that turn large, complex, and messy data into useful information for decision makers and subject-matter experts.

Chase leads projects that accomplish the impossible. To name just a few: he has served as Principal Investigator on multiple NASA research grants, including the Planetary Data Reader (an application that reads nearly all products archived by Planetary Data System) and the Galex Legacy Catalog (a comprehensive catalog of the ultraviolet sky built up from billions of individual photon detections). His work on MSL Mastcam and Mars 2020 Mastcam-Z has saved scientists thousands of work hours and enormously improved the reproducibility and quality of planetary multispectral science. He has archived planetary data from Apollo 15 and 17, Clementine, Chandrayaan-1, the Viking Orbiters, and Chang'e-1 and 2. He has transformed time-domain astronomy, most notably through his work on the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX). His gPhoton project was the world's first real-time analysis frontend for a >100 TB archive of astronomical events.

Chase is a recognized leader in software development best practices and a fierce advocate for open-source software, open data, and quality scientific software and archival. He is a founding member of the OpenPlanetary foundation, an advisor to pyOpenSci, served on the Planetary Data Ecosystem Independent Review Board, and is an alumnus of the Better Scientific Software Fellowship program (during which he developed a groundbreaking method for research software project estimation).

Before founding Million Concepts, Chase worked on the calibration pipeline for the Mars Exploration Rover's Pancam at Cornell, and subsequently worked at Caltech as the lead programmer for GALEX's ground calibration systems. He is also competent in most building trades, plays the guitar well, is a magician member of the Magic Castle, and coordinates a major arts festival in Pennsylvania.