When I first started in Data Management at Rubin, Simon took me out for a beer and a long discussion to find where I would fit in with the team, and discuss what I wanted out of the position. Simon was a mentor to me, and a model whose wealth of knowledge, curiosity, patience, and kindness always inspired me to be more like him in my interactions with others. I’ll miss his sense of humor, smiling face, soothing demeanor, and his wealth of knowledge that he was always willing to share. Plus I never got to fully appreciate his expert knowledge of (hard) ciders (especially, but not limited to, Washington ciders).
I’ll always remember Simon with fondness and admiration, and forever curse the scourge of cancer that extinguishes lights like his from the world.
I will always remember all the help I received from Simon when I was struggling trying to get something from DM on CFHT data ! Simon was the kind of person who always radiates sympathy and kindness, these persons who are the pillars of a project and make the world a little bit more bright. It is a terrible loss and and I am very sad. My deepest sympathy is going to his family.
This is truly sad and a real loss to the Rubin Project, friends, family and all of those Simon touched without knowing. I will always have in my minds eye a vision of Simon as a warm woolly bear with unending kindness and patience. Simon graciously and patiently helped me on many occasions to get up the learning curve of the Rubin software. During these times Simon and I would engage in wide ranging topics from welding two pieces of metal together, baseball and other sports and baking bread. These conversations just scratched the surface of Simons natural curiosity of the world around him.
It is with great sadness that this news is received and I will miss him with the warmth and and kindness he always brought to any setting.
I am deeply saddened to learn of Simon’s passing. He was a tremendous friend, colleague, and mentor. Simon’s contributions to Rubin Observatory are far reaching and almost impossible to measure in part because he routinely went out of his way to help others. Simply put, he made everyone around him better. We have so much to learn from his example.
I had the opportunity to work closely with Simon during the conception and initial development of a science verification package in the Science Pipelines. This was one of the first projects to fully use the new (at the time) Generation 3 middleware and Simon was essential to understanding the opportunities of this approach. I recall days of a small group of us in a conference room in Tucson sketching out the concept on a board and Simon hacking away at a laptop stubbing out the first classes of the new package. I also remember Simon sharing his latest ideas for visualization capabilities on the Rubin Science Platform and developing tutorials for the first “Stack Club” notebooks. Again, Simon was a technical wizard and was one of the first to envision the full scope of how scientists would interact with LSST data. Simon was a mentor to me as I was learning the Science Pipelines and helped to establish many other links between commissioning and data management efforts (e.g., developing first-look tooling for evaluating data quality on the summit). Simon was so knowledgeable, patient, and willing to share ideas that he quickly became a hub within any team that he was part of.
Beyond his outstanding contributions in so many areas of Rubin Observatory, Simon exemplified kindness, creativity, generosity, and joy in learning something new, and these parts I miss terribly. Sending my heartfelt condolences to all his friends and family.
Thank you Frossie for starting this - it brings back so many memories. I first met Simon when he was visiting Chris Miller in Pittsburgh and Chris thought it would be good for me if I took Simon on as a postdoc (I think Chris would admit it was one of his better ideas). We worked in Pittsburgh for a few years before the group moved to UW in 2007. Even back then, Simon had a natural affinity for mentoring students and other postdocs. Many people know him from all the work he did for Rubin leading the alerts team at UW and then as SQuaRE science lead but his impact was much larger than that. He was one three astronomers who built and released Google Sky in 2007. Back in 2010, he created a web based visualization platform for browsing through data that was years ahead of anything else (I found his walkthrough of the capabilities still on line). He developed a very clever way to find supernovae buried in SDSS galaxy spectra and he started up much of the simulations work for Rubin and DESC.
Simon had this unique ability to just make things work - he was a remarkable scientist. Our group liked to talk. We would debate all of the possible bugs and issues that might explain some problem in the data or software. He would just work through the code and then explain what was wrong (we were usually still talking about it by the time he had resolved the problem). He could turn his hand to anything whether software or rerouting the stream that ran under his house in Seattle. On top of this, Simon had an abiding desire to help people, which you could see in the work he took on and in how he led his teams. As everyone has said here, he thought about the people who he was working with and how to support them all the time (including telling me when I could do better - in a gentle way).
Working with Simon was a privilege, but it is the things he did outside of work that I will remember the most. In Pittsburgh, he would head out in the summer for a few days for a canoe race in the middle of nowhere. Not the usual kayak version but kneeling in a canoe and paddling for several days down rapid after rapid. It sounded a terrible way to spend a week in the summer but Simon loved it. In Seattle, he played video and board games, competed at ultimate, explained (frequently) why ultimate should be self-refereed (it really doesn’t make any sense), and had a strange affinity for sandwiches with large amounts of meat. The latter of these manifested as field trips for Caribbean roast sandwiches from Paseo, though Simon was equally adept at grilling, roasting, or smoking any quantity of meat for any number of people. One of the things that will always stay with me was his passion for keeping fish - my younger son’s first fish tank came from Simon. I will miss going round to his house to see his fish tanks, which dominated the room, or to have him explain how to do home repair or just to have a beer. I will miss his laughter and his smile.
I knew Simon from working with him on the Virtual Observatory project, starting in around 2005. Simon was someone I am grateful to have known in the brief time our lives crossed paths. I was always, always so delighted to see him. Just to think of seeing him walk into a room makes me smile like I did back in the days we worked together. Seeing the photos posted in this thread does the same. As was mentioned in the original post here, it’s true it wasn’t always an environment that rewarded pro-social behavior - but Simon embodied the exception that proves the rule. He was truly a Good Guy.
On the occasions we met, we bonded over our Maine connection, and having grown up in Boston I always appreciated the Red Sox cap he wore. His humor and dedication to doing whatever he was doing the best he could were inspiring and endearing.
There were many meetings and trips where I got to hang out with him, but my favorite memory is from one of the NVO Summer Schools in Aspen, Colorado. He and Chris Miller would take advantage of the breaks and go down to the stream behind the resort to fish. I wasn’t a fishing person, but I asked if I could go with them one time. I think the time I went it was just with Simon. We didn’t talk much that afternoon, and no fish were caught, but I remember it as a sweet bonding moment, a peaceful lesson, and a treasure in time.
This one hits hard, even though I haven’t seen Simon in many years. My heart goes out to his family, and I hope he knows how much people appreciated him.
Oh Simon; always reliable, helpful, and kind. We’ll miss you.
I didn’t know Simon loved to keep fish (thanks, Andy). All I knew about Simon and Fish came from his lovely “Not Work” talk on a summer job electric-fishing for a fisheries project, a rather less harmless way to interact. Maybe he was making amends?
Simon and I started on LSST at close to the same time, way back in 2006/2007. We shared an office for most of the time until he went to Tucson. He really was just the best office mate, and I am so glad that I bribed him with the window spot during an early-on UW office re-shuffle. He inspired me to learn so many things that were new to me then and have been incredibly helpful since, and had a real impact on my work.
He absolutely was such a kind, fun and smart person and we had so many good conversations, from work stuff to parenting, from boats to ultimate to biking and on. At some point we dreamed up the multi-day event “Feats of Lake Washington” which would be composed of a canoe race in the lake with portage section (across part of maybe Montlake?), a bike ride which would go around Lake Washington and include stops at some of the breweries, and a run across the lake on I-90 (or I-520 now). There might have been a swim across the lake as well, although I can’t remember if it seemed redundant with the run or not. It might not be all in one go, but when I visit Seattle, I’m going to try to pick off these feats one at a time, although they may be a bit modified (because come on, I am not carrying a canoe across Montlake, especially not by myself).
He and his family will always have a big warm and fuzzy spot in my heart. I will never forget him and Gin visiting and bringing me and my partner a meal when my first child was about a week old. At the time I think his oldest kid was a few years old, so they were much more experienced in this parenting thing and I was at that spot when you first have a baby of “oh my god, we’re never going to do anything other than try to sleep, eat, and feed a baby ever again”. And Simon and Gin came over and told me how cute Seren was and gave us food and told me sympathetic stories of their kid projectile vomiting that made me feel like we weren’t doing so badly and it would probably be ok. It meant a lot.
From 2009, at UW. I think Simon may actually be wearing one of those canoe race t-shirts?
I think this was a photo I took for our photos for the UW LSST group webpage at the time.
I am deeply saddened to hear of Simon’s passing. I would like to thank him for making me feel at home while visiting UW many years ago. I really admired how the team worked as one and Simon was key for that to happen, he was a very positive person who cared about others. We had some really productive discussions back then about image subtraction, astrometric solutions and dipoles.
I would like to extend my deepest sympathies to his family.
Like most of you, I am still feeling shocked by this sad news about Simon. I didn’t know him well, but I am grateful for the opportunities I had to work with him. I guess the first time was in 2018, when he, Keith Bechtol, and I organized a joint RSP bootcamp for the Commissioning, DM, and Camera teams to work together. Simon was kind and he chose his words carefully. He seemed happy to engage and to work toward convergence of different approaches to make something new. I will be thinking of him as we continue to pull all the parts of Rubin together. – Steve Ritz
Dear all, thank you for the stories and the pictures . Please keep them coming, his family appreciates them, as do we.
There have been questions about helping the family in a tangible way. We will be holding a fundraiser towards the children’s educational expenses - instructions on how to contribute coming soon.
When Simon arrived in Tucson, I recall he was fascinated by the lizards.
He was an observer of Nature for sure, and there’s a picture he took from his living room at home with two roadrunners and a coyote in the same frame. In his own words, “This is too good not to share twice.”
Simon was always willing to be in the middle of complex situations. Here is is in the middle of the first commissioning workshop.
Also always a balanced contributor to the DM leadership team - here we all are in UW in 2018 (Simon is in the middle).
I was happy to facilitate Simon’s move to Tucson (to the office next to mine) and a little back from management. He was very productive and extremely so when one considers all the people he helped along the way.
Heartbreaking news. All my sympathies to Simon’s family, friends, and colleagues. I first met him when as a student I was visiting someone at UW in Seattle. Later I applied for a job with LSST, and Simon interviewed me, twice, because due to some UW admin snafu the position had to be re-advertised. I didn’t get the job, but I will never forget how personable Simon was, and how much he cared about “taking the blame” and reassuring me to re-apply when the position needed to be advertised anew. I’ll cherish all conversations I’ve had with Simon since then, at workshops and elsewhere.
I didn’t get to work with Simon nearly as much as I would have liked, and now I won’t get the chance any more and that is just so sad. The few times I visited UW as a postdoc I remember him being the friendliest person around - and given the extreme friendliness of everyone up there that’s really saying something! @mwv and I gravitated towards him at the Phoenix PCW when the three of us got excited about doing a big (at the time) image simulation in the LSST DESC as a data challenge pathfinder - and it was Simon’s idea to call the project “Twinkles”. I remember how delighted he had made himself by coming up with that name: it was a hugely contrived acronym that still conveyed the essence of what was most fun about the data, which was that when processed into a movie it would show all the time-variable stars and AGN flickering and, well, twinkling. I remember thinking, Yes! I wish to work with people like Simon who use all their education and cleverness to make work fun. And just remembering the look on his face when he managed to simultaneously sidle slyly and also bound excitedly up to me to tell me his idea is making me smile all over again. So, I think we should all redouble our efforts to make working on the LSST as much fun as possible, and then tell ourselves quietly in memoriam, “Well, Simon would have loved this.”
Hey folks so we’ve started a small fundraiser towards the kids’ educational expenses for those that wish to support the family in a tangible way. You can find it here: ls.st/kskfam - please share it with your colleagues who might be interested. Any amount is fine, don’t be shy, but for those facing mental block and want to look for the answer in the back of the book, if we give $50 per person on average we’ll have a nice kitty.
The family has a memorial site here if you would like to share further thoughts Simon Krughoff's Memorial Website | Ever Loved - Gin passed on her thanks to all who shared their memories here.
The sad news came as a big a surprise and I could not bering myself to believe it. I left Rubin more than three years ago and did not know Simon was sick. I remembered his calm demeanor and genuine smile. He was always patient and ready to help. He was so knowledgable in both astronomy and software. And I was pleasantly surprised when he told me he tried to cook a Chinese dish he really liked. He will be sorely missed.
A few years back, in the “before times”, DMLT spent a beautiful evening at Michelle Butler’s spread outside of Champaign. I recently found this picture of Simon from these happier times in my photo reel, and as we are coming up his memorial games session at the JTM tonight I felt it might be a good time to share.
I know Simon would have secretly appreciated an “…outstanding in his field” groaner here, though he would have deadpanned the response. Miss you, man…
. Please keep them coming, his family appreciates them, as do we.
