MacResearch

Mission

MacResearch.org is an open and independent community for scientists using Mac OS X and related hardware in their research. It is the mission of this site to cultivate a knowledgeable and vibrant community of researchers to exchange ideas and information, build a community knowledge-base, and collectively escalate the prominence of Apple technologies in the scientific research community.

Executive Committee

David Gohara (Chair)

David Gohara is Director of Research Computing for the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and a Senior Programmer Analyst at the Center for Computational Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. David's expertise resides primarily in accelerating structural biology applications for specific hardware architectures, and in particular Apple hardware. In addition to porting and optimizing a number of scientific applications to the OS X platform, David has been actively involved in designing and implementing novel methods for image processing and signal enhancement for Cryo-Electron Microscopy.

Joel Dudley

Joel Dudley is a Bioinformatician in the laboratory of Dr. Atul Butte at Stanford Biomedical Informatics Research. He spends most of his time developing methods and tools to facilitate integrative biology. In particular he is interested in Translational Bioinformatics, which is the development of methods, tools, and systems to facilitate and accelerate the translation of fundamental discoveries in genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc into novel drugs and biomarkers as well as improved clinical protocols and procedures.

Drew McCormack

Drew McCormack is a Researcher in the Theoretical Chemistry Department of the Free University in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He has extensive experience applying High Performance Computing to the field of Molecular Quantum Dynamics, and contributes to the development of the Quantum Chemistry application ADF. Drew has experience in a broad range of programming languages, including Objective-C, Fortran 90, and C++, and has developed packages for systems ranging from desktop Macs to massively parallel supercomputers. He has a passion for high-level scripting languages like Python, and develops Cocoa applications in his spare time. He has also written several articles on Cocoa development, and contributed to the book Beginning Mac OS X Programming.

Chris Swain

Chris Swain is Director/Founder of Cambridge MedChem Consulting a company providing Medicinal Chemistry and computational chemistry expertise to the Pharma and Biotech industry. Previously he was Senior Director Medicinal and Computational Chemistry at the Neuroscience Research Center where he led the NK1 project team that discovered the anti-emetic Emend. Chris is also the author of the cheminfomatics tool iBabel and the creator for the Macinchem website. Particular interests are the use of computational tools to accelerate drug discovery.

Gaurav Khanna

Gaurav Khanna is an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, MA. His expertise lies in the area of Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics, more specifically, in black hole related phenomena and cosmology. His research typically involves large supercomputer simulations of relevant astrophysical phenomena and therefore he has a keen interest in the discipline of High-Performance Computing. Gaurav has been running a website (http://hpc.sf.net/) focussed at scientific computing software (including HPC) on Macs for many years now. To find out more about his work, please visit: http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/

Geoff Hutchison

Geoff Hutchison is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on the design and understanding of molecular materials, usually combining experimental and theoretical approaches. For the latter, he often uses various cluster computing resources and is the head developer and maintainer of the Open Babel project, an open source chemical toolbox. On his trusty PowerBook G4, he also wrote up the ChemSpotlight plugin for indexing chemistry on Mac OS X.

Alexander Griekspoor

Alexander Griekspoor is a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow working at the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK. After a PhD in Cell Biology he switched fields and joined the text mining group at the EBI where he develops a workflow for the ranking of candidate genes derived from large biological screening experiments. Alexander is perhaps most well-known as "Mek" from the duo "Mekentosj". Together with his friend Tom "Tosj" Groothuis he developed a number of scientific Cocoa applications, two of which won Apple Design Awards for best Best Student and Best scientific Mac OS X application, respectively. In his spare time he continues to work on creating new and innovative Mac OS X applications, of which his recently released new program Papers is a prime example.