Our Team

Julien Michel

Julien is professor of Biomolecular Simulation at the University of Edinburgh.

He has over 20 years of experience in academic research in molecular simulation methodologies and their applications to simulations of biomolecular systems of pharmaceutical interest.  He has an extensive track-record of collaborative research with the pharmaceutical industry and is a member of the academic consortia CCPBioSim and HECBioSim.

Lester Hedges

Lester is lead Research Software Engineer at OpenBioSim.

Trained as a physicist, Lester has a background in statistical mechanics and has worked on problems ranging from the glass transition to nucleation and phase transformation. He is interested in improving the reproducibility and interoperability of research software.

Lester Hodges

Christopher Woods

Christopher is Head of Research Software Engineering at the University of Bristol.

He began his career as a computational chemist, spending ~15 years developing new software and new algorithms for predicting biomolecular free energies. He now heads one of the first academic Research Software Engineering (RSE) groups and holds a Catalyst award for his help in establishing and growing the UK Society of RSE. He and his group now work collaboratively to improve the quality of UK research software, under the motto “Better Software, Better Research”.

Mark Mackey

Mark is a founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cresset.

Mark has been working in computational methods development for more than 25 years and is responsible for the Cresset scientific research team as well as guiding the software development process at Cresset.

Mark Mackey
Ben Cossins

Ben Cossins

Ben is Director of Molecular Dynamics at Exscientia Ltd.

He has over 20 years of experience of modelling in academia and industry. A specialism in the use of molecular simulation to optimise small molecule drugs and find their targets has taken up the majority of this time.

Charles Laughton

Charlie is Professor of Computational Pharmaceutical Science at the University of Nottingham. He has more than 30 years experience in Computational Modelling and Informatics, primarily related to Biomolecular science, and Drug Discovery and Development. He focuses particularly on the development of software tools for data analysis and validation, and for high-throughput and high-performance computing.

Charlie Laughton

Matthew Burman

Matthew is a Research Software Engineer at OpenBioSim. Trained as both a mathematician and physicist, Matthew has a background in statistical and biophysics and has worked on problems including DNA supercoiling and rolling circle RNA synthesis, and is currently interested in developing software for a range of academic and industrial applications.