OpenEye Scientific Software

Anthony Nicholls, Ph.D., President and CEO

Anthony Nicholls is from Plymouth, England, home to what used to be one of the worst soccer teams in the nation. He studied Physics at Oxford after which, looking for something different, he joined the Institute for Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University. There he studied quantum dispersion of excitations in biological systems with William Rhodes and football with Bobby Bowden. He earned his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1988 and began a post-doc with Barry Honig at Columbia University, New York. There he re-wrote the electrostatics program DelPhi and wrote the widely-used graphics software GRASP. Owning and controlling rights to neither, he listened to the wisdom of Dave Weininger, founder of Daylight C.I.S., and left Columbia in 1997 to found OpenEye in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His chief desire is to have the work ethic of his father who, in 1996, retired as the longest serving postman in England (48.5 years).

Matthew Stahl, Ph.D., Senior Vice President, Head of Strategic Development

Matthew Stahl received a B.S. degree in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Washington in 1991. He then attended the University of Arizona and received his Ph.D. working with Dr. Eugene Mash. Matthew's dissertation work included a modeling study of the transition states of diastereoselective nucleophilic additions to cyclopropyl ketones. Upon completion of his Ph.D. in 1995 he accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University working for Professor E. J. Corey. Matthew then joined the Biophysics group at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and was later promoted to Manager of ChemInformatics. In 1998, Matthew accepted a position at OpenEye Scientific Software as Chief Scientific Geek.

Prior to OpenEye he authored or co-authored Babel, Padre, Wizard III, LHASA, DEREK, XBabel, Mongoose to name but a few. At OpenEye he wrote the original version of ROCS, was one of the OEChem hive-minds and continues to develop Omega. In addition, he created OELib, that now has an independent open-source existence. Matt is now involved in the business side of OpenEye, managing the growth of sales and expectations.

A. Geoffrey Skillman, M.D., Ph.D., VP, Research

Geoff Skillman graduated from Stanford with a degree in Chemistry in 1990. His herculean efforts at UCSF earned him a Ph.D. with Tack Kuntz in 1999 (Structure-Based Design of Combinatorial Libraries) and an M.D. in 2000 (Making People Better). Geoff enjoys hiking, climbing, swimming and threatening physical violence to Anthony, Matt and Roger when they do not play nice. Geoff was also one of the OEChem authors, wrote Omega 1.8, Filter, QuacPac, the LexiChem Plugin and now Brood. He is now in charge of scientific research at OpenEye, which just goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.

Bob Tolbert, Ph.D., VP, Development

Bob Tolbert received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from the United States Naval Academy in 1983. Upon graduation he entered Nuclear Power training and served as an officer aboard submarines in the U. S. Navy for ten years. Bob earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1997 from the University of Idaho where he worked with W. Dan Edwards studying the theory of atoms in molecules as applied to homoaromaticity. In 1998, Bob joined the Information Technology group at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where, as a Senior Principal Systems Engineer, he was responsible for all aspects of computational chemistry and cheminformatics. In 2002, Bob ran away to join the circus. And the circus was glad to have him. Now ringmaster to the plethora of OpenEye product, Bob continues the high-wire act of programming and managing those who program. He is responsible for the current ROCS, EON, python and java toolkits and has contributed to nearly every other program. Who said the circus was supposed to be fun?

Roger Sayle, Ph.D., VP, Software Engineering

Roger Sayle received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from Imperial College, London in 1989 and Ph.D. from Edinburgh in 1994. The interesting bit is that, during his time at Edinburgh, he wrote RasMol, the world's most-used molecular visualization program (even discounting the rip-offs Chime and WebLab Viewer). In 1998, after four years at Glaxo-Wellcome doing Bioinformatics, he listened to Anthony Nicholl's advice that there was "no down-side" to joining Daylight spin-off Metaphorics, LLC. Three years later, struggling to find the up-side, he joined OpenEye with the infamous remark: "It's better than nothing." Indeed. At OpenEye he has continued to write remarkable code, hive-minding OEChem with Geoff and Matt, taking on the Aegean stables of chemical nomenclature, generating the best 2D depictions anywhere and collaborating with Ant in the murky world of electrostatics and Lewis Carroll acronyms with WABE.

Janet Rasmussen, VP, Finance

Janet Rasmussen, the original model for the character "Emma Peel" in the Avengers, joined OpenEye in 2003 when Mercury was in retrograde. Which explains a lot really, although none of us is sure exactly what. But we do know OpenEye has never been the same since in that people actually get paid at the end of the month rather than a random date afterwards, the words "Don't make me set Janet on you" is about the only threat from Anthony anyone takes seriously and we'd all eat even worse junk food without her. As comptroller she is supposed to keep the money we make and we all vaguely hope she isn't taking that role too literally, especially given her predilection for tropical islands. She claims to have met John Denver but we've never clarified if that was before or after his accident. Janet. R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Joe Corkery, M.D., Principal Developer

Joseph Corkery received a B.S.E. degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1998. While at Princeton, he consulted for AT&T Consumer Labs developing HOT AIR (an automated information responder) which he brought through customer testing to a working product for AT&T WorldNet Services. After Princeton, he spent one year at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in the Molecular Modeling group developing software primarily focusing on docking, conformation analysis, library design, and user interfaces. He left Vertex to attend Harvard Medical School. During his first year he worked part-time for OpenEye developing VIDA. He elected to take a leave of absence from Harvard to join OpenEye as a full time employee starting in October 2000. In the autumn of 2002, he took a leave of absence from OpenEye to complete his M.D., but is now back with us full time. It was Joe's now-wife Alison who first commented on the strong sense of entitlement at OpenEye.

Paul Hawkins, Ph.D., Senior Applications Scientist

What were the odds that OpenEye would hire another Englishman after their experience with the "disagreeable duo," Anthony and Roger? Long, you might have thought, which just goes to show why bookies make their money. Paul used to work at Tripos, and when we saw him give a talk that made their software look good, we made him an offer. Paul is the first of a new breed at OpenEye, an application scientist. What we mean by that is that Paul will be helping customers do science with our applications, either by visiting them and delighting them with stories of how dysfunctional we are, or by working on examples, white-papers and publications in the home office. Paul, he's from OpenEye and he's here to help you.

Brian Kelley, M. Eng., Research Scientist/Senior Developer

Brian is a Cornell graduate with a BA in Physics and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. We first got to know him when he worked at BioReason in Santa Fe, but before we could hire him he moved off to the Whitehead in Boston. Our patience is infinite, and eventually he saw the error of his ways and joined OpenEye. He lists as his interests: rowing, rock climbing, sailing and opera, which just goes to show how broad-minded we are. He also has nerves of steel, as evidenced by demonstrating Vida2 live at CUP6, and is adept at confusing employees of Schroedinger. Isn't that Anthony's job?

Mark McGann, Ph.D., Principal Developer

Mark McGann received his B.S. from Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in the Spring of 1993. He then spent six months as a quality assurance engineer at Rogers Materials Molding division before entering graduate school at Tulane University Chemical Engineering department in January 1994. His graduate research focused on detailed molecular simulations of polymer crystals. Mark graduated from Tulane with a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in the fall of 1998 and took a position at the Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute where he developed fast docking programs for structure-based drug design in collaboration with OpenEye. He joined OpenEye in October 2000. Mark has the most amazing collection of video games anyone has ever seen.

Scott Parker, Senior Account Manager

Scott Parker is a Spoken Word performer who has bridged the gap between poetry and science. His dynamic style of speaking and Fire Flowpoetry combines rhythm, science, and a highly condensed depth of poetic language. His delivery on stage makes him one of the most unique and riveting performers on the U.S. scientific and artistic landscape. Scott speaks shamanically through poems of drug discovery and computational methods, tells modeling stories of the international pharmaceutical and Biotech communities, and poetically rants and rages about both Ligand-based and Structure-based drug discovery. In 2006, he was appointed as the first ever "Poet-In-Residence" at OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc., Santa Fe, New Mexico's premier computational Chemistry software provider. He has performed over 500 times in the USA with other computational companies, modeling software outfits, and as a solo poet.

Kevin Schmidt, Senior Developer

Kevin Schmidt decided to work at OpenEye when he saw Anthony drove a better car than he did. Prior to that moment of enlightenment he had worked in several real companies, including NASA-Ames and the ill-fated Ars Digita. He's a graduate of MIT and his last job involved writing the sound subsystem for the video game "Spiderman." In other words: he's a real programmer, unlike some of us.

Vincent Vivien, Director of European Accounts

Vincent Vivien joined OpenEye in 2006, initially just as the sales coordinator for Europe. However, in 2007, his first full year of operations, he succeeded in selling more software than the rest of OpenEye combined. He claimed his secret was "keeping Anthony away from customers." In 2008 he joined the board of directors. And, in May 2009, in an attack coordinated with the Boston office, he staged the Night of the Long Vowels, deposing the Santa Fe cabal and setting up new headquarters in Barcelona with himself as CEO, Mean Joe Corkery as his hatchet man, and Matt Stahl as the "Vice President with particular responsibilities for the nicer parts of Italy." His change in priorities for OpenEye finally allowed Stan's theories of time travel to be funded, leading to this uncannily accurate website.

Gregory L. Warren, Ph.D., Senior Applications Scientist

Greg started work making brooms and tending honey bees. After one too many stings, he decided to try degrees in Chemistry and Biology from Walla Walla College (don't laugh). After graduation, and lacking employability, he decided to go to graduate school at MIT but was unable to decide on a course of study (note the pattern developing?). So he did protein crystallography, solution and solid-state NMR in the labs of Greg Petsko and Bob Griffin. In his spare time he played the French horn for beer money. (No really.) Following an "extended" post-doc in Brünger lab at Yale, he got his first job where he didn't have to panhandle, i.e., as a computational chemist at SmithKline Beecham later, unfortunately, to become GlaxoSmithKline. Tired of the incessant demands for monthly reports, he left in 2006 to join the hive-mind where he has the dubious honor of doubling OpenEye's pharmaceutical experience but once again gets stung a lot. There's a moral here somewhere.

Stanislaw Wlodek, Ph.D., Senior Scientist

Stan Wlodek received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Warsaw. He spent several years in Canada as a post-doc and then went south to the University of Houston where he worked with Andy MacCammon. He moved to Santa Fe in 1998. In the fall of 2001, Stan started working as a consultant with OpenEye, implementing the AM1-BCC charging method of Chris Bayly. He decided against taking the coaching job for Poland in the 2002 World Cup, which can be directly related to Poland's lethargic performance, and joined OpenEye. Notwithstanding on how well Poland does in the 2006 competition, we anticipate Stan remaining at OpenEye and continuing his work on Szybki (he made us name it that) and Afitt (our bad).