John Chodera has spent two decades advancing the state-of-the-art in biomolecular simulations to accelerate drug discovery. He has driven the development of open source tools to support the biomolecular simulation and drug discovery ecosystem—such as OpenMM, a GPU-accelerated biomolecular simulation framework downloaded over 4 million times that powers advances such as AlphaFold.
He has built open science communities to catalyze transformation of the field, such as (1) the Open Force Field Initiative, which produces open datasets, tools, and models for drug discovery; (2) the COVID Moonshot, which delivered a patent-free COVID antiviral preclinical candidate into IND-enabling studies in 18 months; (3) the Folding@home Consortium, a planetary-scale distributed computing project which has run simulations on over a million GPUs to accelerate drug discovery; and (4) the $68M NIH-funded AI-driven Structure-enabled Antiviral Program (ASAP) which uses planetary-scale free energy calculations to accelerate open science antiviral drug discovery for pandemic preparedness with the goal of globally equitable and affordable access to medicines.
His laboratory has trained a generation of talented researchers working at the interface of open source software, physical modeling, statistical mechanics, and machine learning that have gone on to work at Schrodinger, DE Shaw Research, Relay Therapeutics, Charm Therapeutics, Isomorphic Labs, Psivant Therapeutics, Moderna, and BioNTech.