Woody Sherman, Ph.D. – Founder
Woody has a Ph.D. from MIT in physical chemistry specializing in computational biophysical chemistry. His undergraduate degree is in physical chemistry, specializing in the study of quantum mechanical properties of organic polymers. Dr. Sherman has teaching experience at MIT working with students in chemistry classes both in laboratory and recitation environments. He did research in Biogen’s computational drug discovery unit applying novel techniques to the design of affinity-enhanced antibodies. He is currently Vice President of Applications Science at Schrödinger, a computational chemistry company.

David Green, Ph.D. – Founder
David Green is a researcher with 10 years of experience in the field of computational biophysics. He has a Bachelors degree in Chemistry from Simon Fraser University, a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where he held a Merck-MIT Graduate Fellowship), and spent three years as a post-doctoral associate jointly between MIT’s Bioengineering Division and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has developed software for biophysical characterization and optimization of protein binding sites, and has worked on the design of protein complexes with small molecules, peptides, and other proteins, after beginning his scientific career as a synthetic chemist. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at Stony Brook University, where he has a strong research program focused on the design of specifically interacting protein complexes. As a teaching assistant at MIT, he taught introductory college-level chemistry courses, and currently teaches graduate-level courses in Applied Mathematics and Computational Biology. He has published nine papers in the peer-reviewed literature and is an author of a unit of Current Protocols in Bioinformatics.

Karl Ruping – Founder
Karl is a Fellow in the Advanced Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a practicing patent attorney with a technical background in computer science. He has been legal counsel to numerous software companies, and has practical business experience in building early-stage venture start-ups. Karl is also the founder and president of IncTank, a technology incubator and early-stage venture capital firm.

Jon Cody Haines – Principal Investigator & Senior Project Manager
Jon Cody brings a wealth of experience from managing both hardware and software development projects, inclusive of mobile devices and Apple Apps. Mr. Haines has successfully developed numerous small companies beyond start-up stage. He received a B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire and a M.Sc. degree in Engineering Management from Northeastern University.

J. Marius Vilkas, Ph.D. – Senior Software Engineer
Marius Vilkas is a theoretical physicist specializing in solving the problems of fundamental theoretical biophysics and the more applied problems of the computational physics and chemistry, fusion plasma physics, nanotechnology and biotechnology. He graduated with distinction from the Vilnius University specializing in physics. He received his PhD from the Vilnius University in Lithuania in the field of nonrelativistic many-body perturbation theory and its applications in physics and astrophysics. He had developed and implemented a fully relativistic multireference many-body perturbation theory. The developed computer program fully incorporates relativistic and QED effects and accounts for both nondynamic and dynamic correlations. For the scattering processes he developed several modules of R-matrix code to include second-order effective Hamiltonian into target description. At the University of Puerto Rico he was closely involved in the solid-state projects such as the development of the suitable materials for the Li-ion battery and on the catalytic properties of the metallic Pt and bimetallic Pt/Ru surfaces using direct molecular dynamics. Recently his research interests shifted to the theoretical studies of large biological structures. He implemented multicenter polarized continuum model into Gaussian03 programming package by solving Poisson equation using integral finite element method as well as analytical derivatives for the geometry optimization and frequency analysis.

Soumya Ray, Ph.D. – Senior Scientist
Dr. Ray obtained his Ph.D. training in the subject of protein crystallography as a visiting student at the Rockefeller University and internationally at the Indian Institute of Science, while working on enzymes from infectious disease related organisms. After graduation, Dr. Ray was hired as a postdoctoral fellow in department of neurology at Harvard University and later promoted to Assistant Professor in the same department. As a faculty member, he currently teaches part of an introductory course in protein structural biology at Harvard Medical School. The major research focus of his laboratory is geared towards finding small molecule therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS and Parkinson’s disease.

Kristoffer Haines – Education Consultant
Kristoffer is an independent education consultant, providing guidance and assistance for public schools nationwide, on strategic planning, financial and operations systems development, and fundraising. Kristoffer was the Chief Operating Officer of KIPP Austin Public Schools during the region’s first two years of growth, managing and scaling its operational systems to ensure its strategic plan was realized. Kristoffer began his foray into education as a high school English teacher, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.