JW serves as Head of Computational Science where he leads a diverse team integrating machine learning, cheminformatics, and molecular modeling with the ATLAS platform.

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Prior to Kimia, JW led a drug discovery team in Google Research where they applied deep learning and massive compute to accelerate the discovery of small molecule drugs. JW was an early employee at Denali Therapeutics where he built the molecular modeling and informatics group to support both small molecule and biotherapeutics discovery. Key contributions from his team lead to inventions of multiple drugs entering clinical trials.

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Prior to Denali, JW was a Scientist at Genentech supporting small molecule drug discovery. JW received bachelor of science degrees in Computer Science and Biochemistry at The Ohio State University. After college, he was seduced by the Y2K rage and joined IBM as a software engineer and soon recognized his true love was to apply computer science to solve problems in biology. He found that at Washington University in St. Louis where he developed a systematic ligand docking algorithm that decouples sampling and scoring. He also experimentally tested hypotheses generated by molecular dynamic simulations and gained expertise in solid phase peptide synthesis, protein NMR, and calorimetry.

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JW earned a PhD in Computational Biology at Wash U in the laboratory of Dr. Garland Marshall.

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