About the project and team#
napari is a consensus-based community project. Anyone with an interest in the project can join the community, contribute to the project design, and participate in the decision making process. You can learn more about how the project is run by reading our governance model. This page lists our current and emeritus core team members. Core team members are community members that have demonstrated a sustained commitment to the project through ongoing contributions and that they can maintain napari with care. We also list our current and emeritus steering council members. Finally, the project currently has a number of paid team members in various roles supported by grants. They are listed below under the Team Roles section
Current Core Team Members#
Emeritus Core Team Members#
Current Steering Council Members#
Emeritus Steering Council Members#
Team Roles#
To best serve napari’s development, operations, and community, several team roles are contracted. Currently contracted roles are listed below:
Developers-in-Residence: Grezgorz Bokota, Lorenzo Gaifas, Draga Doncila Pop
Community Managers: Tim Monko, Lorenzo Gaifas
Operations Manager: Draga Doncila Pop
Release Manager: Rotating role. For current release manager see the Zulip #release channel.
We are also contracting with Quansight for some key maintenance items:
Melissa Weber Mendonça is working on auto-generating videos and screenshots for our documentation and other documentation maintenance & improvements
Jaime Rodríguez-Guerra is working on maintaining and improving our bundled application and the
napari-plugin-managerDaniel Althviz Moré is working on refactoring our layer controls implementation, improving the
napari-plugin-manager, and migrating our application model toapp-model
Project history#
The napari project began in the spring of 2018. It was born out of the shared need for fast n-dimensional image viewing in Python by project co-founders Loïc Royer, from the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (CZ Biohub), and Juan Nunez-Iglesias, from Monash University. Since then it has grown rapidly to now also provide a graphical user interface to a plugin ecosystem of image analysis tools for scientists to use in their daily work.
Named after the tiny village of Napari, in the Republic of Kiribati in the Pacifc Ocean, at the geographic midpoint between Loïc’s home of San Francisco and Juan’s home of Melbourne, the napari project has, from its inception, been a global community effort.
Early development on the project was led by Kira Evans, first as an intern with Loïc at CZ Biohub, then later as a software engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Nicholas Sofroniew (CZI) joined in the fall of 2018, accelerating both the organization and management of the growing team, as well as the development of core features.
You can read a full history of the project’s founding and early development in this blog post from Juan.
Over time, napari has grown to over 180 direct contributors. Talley Lambert, from Harvard Medical School, began contributing around the time of Juan’s blog post, and has been a critical driver of napari’s development, including development of its first and second (current) plugin systems.
We now have core team members located in four continents and three fortnightly community calls spread across the day to accommodate users and contributors in any time zone.
Read more about napari’s mission and values, how to get started as a contributor or join us in our public chat room. You can also follow us on mastodon, Bluesky, or LinkedIn.
Institutional and funding partners#
napari is developed by a global community of scientists, with many working as volunteers, improving napari for their own use while sharing their work with the world. We appreciate their efforts!
We have also received generous direct funding and in-kind support that enables us to develop faster:
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has long supported napari in numerous ways (listed in reverse chronological order):
CZI is currently supporting napari with a grant for scaffolding sustainability of the project (2025-2028, $1.7m)
CZI is currently supporting napari with a grant to seed sustainability of the project (2022-2025, $200,0000).
CZI is matching funds donated to the project up to $100,000.
The CZI Imaging Tech team, in an effort led by Justin Kiggins, developed and maintained the original version of napari-hub, which helps users discover napari plugins (2021-2025).
CZI funded two grant rounds to support the napari community in developing and maintaining plugins (2021, 2022).
The CZI Imaging Tech team, led by Nick Sofroniew and Justine Larsen, contributed development and design effort for the project (2019-2023) and funded contributors at Quansight Labs to work for the project (2021-2023).
napari co-founder Juan Nunez-Iglesias has been supported by a CZI Imaging Software Fellowship (2018-2025)
NumFOCUS serves as the fiscal home of the napari project. As part of this fiscal sponsorship, NumFOCUS provides Small Development Grants for napari, funding current efforts to improve handling of physical units.
As described in our governance document, project supporters are represented by a seat on the napari steering council. The current representative of the napari Institutional and Funding Partners is Kyle I. S. Harrington (CZI).
If you or your organization are interested in also supporting the napari project and becoming an Institutional and Funding Partner, please email the napari steering council at napari-steering-council@googlegroups.com.