Good luck with this project! As a (ex?)scientist, the problem I remember is looking if there is a mature-enough library and still in active development/support.

Good luck with this project! As a (ex?)scientist, the problem I remember is looking if there is a mature-enough library and still in active development/support. (Usually there are many, but only a few actually useful.) A few other ways to go is to scan arXiv for citations of software, https://pypi.python.org/pypi https://pypi.python.org/pypi for scientific packages, etc.