New job at Open Molecular Software Foundation

I’m pleased to announce that I have joined the Open Molecular Software Foundation (OMSF) as a Senior Software Scientist. My work will be focused on developing for Open Free Energy (OpenFE), a project to create and curate open source tools for free energy calculations, especially alchemical free energy calculations. This is an exciting opportunity for me for several reasons.

First, this gives me a chance to expand my scientific repertoire by working on alchemical free energy calculations. These calculations allow us to compare, for example, how well two different drugs bind by a protein by computationally mutating one drug into the other. Basically, we use computers to do magic! Although the details are very different from my previous work, a lot of the practical concerns when writing such code are very similar to issues I dealt with during the development of OpenPathSampling, so I’ll be well-prepared (and well-suited) for the work.

Another reason this is exciting is that much of my work will be on developing a new tool. That is to say, this is a greenfield project, which always gives a lot of freedom as a developer to shape the long-term picture.

Finally, I’m excited to be joining a project and organization that are dedicated to writing open source software. One of the things I have enjoyed during my academic coding career is that everything I do is open, public, and available to everyone. Granted, not everyone has the expertise to do new science with the tools I develop, but I like knowing that money is not a barrier to someone using my tools. Whether you’re in industry, academia, or just a curious individual, the software I’ll be writing with OMSF and OpenFE is available to you.

To answer the obvious question of, “if the software is free, how do you get paid”: OMSF is a nonprofit organization. Much of our funding comes from donations from industry. Essentially, the software I’ll be developing for OpenFE is potentially of great value to pharmaceutical companies, but developing their own software in-house would be too expensive. So a number of them get together and donate to the OpenFE project. Each one pays a fraction of a salary, but together, they give enough to employ our team.

OMSF is still very new, so there’s a sense of being part of a start-up, as well as a nonprofit. I’m excited about the new model of scientific software development that OMSF is trying to pioneer, and looking forward to contributing to it!