Meet our Leadership Team

Anthony Nicholls

Corporate Vice President

Anthony Nicholls is from Plymouth, England, home to what used to be one of the worst soccer teams in the nation. He studied Physics at Oxford after which, looking for something different, he joined the Institute for Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University. There he studied quantum dispersion of excitations in biological systems with William Rhodes and football with Bobby Bowden. He earned his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1988 and began a post-doc with Barry Honig at Columbia University, New York. There he re-wrote the electrostatics program Delphi and wrote the widely-used graphics software GRASP. Owning and controlling rights to neither, he listened to the wisdom of Dave Weininger, founder of Daylight C.I.S., and left Columbia in 1997 to found OpenEye in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His chief desire is to have the work ethic of his father who, in 1996, retired as the longest serving postman in England (48.5 years).

A. Geoffrey Skillman

Vice President, R&D

Geoff Skillman graduated from Stanford with a degree in Chemistry in 1990. His herculean efforts at UCSF earned him a Ph.D. with Tack Kuntz in 1999 (Structure-Based Design of Combinatorial Libraries) and an M.D. in 2000. Geoff enjoys fishing, biking and relaxing with his family. He was also one of the OEChem authors, wrote Omega 1.8, Filter, QuacPac, the LexiChem Plugin and now Brood. He is now in charge of scientific research at OpenEye, which just goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.

Jeffrey Grandy

Vice President, Commercial & Sales

Since joining OpenEye in 2007 Jeff has held positions of increasing responsibility spanning sales in the western United States, growth in emerging markets, software partnerships, marketing, business strategy and the transition to Software-as-a-Service. He now leads the Commercial Team which comprises sales, marketing, partnerships, and scientists dedicated to ensuring the success of OpenEye customers and growth of the business. Prior to OpenEye he worked in market development and sales roles at Invitrogen (now part of ThermoFisher) commercializing human protein microarrays; Tripos (now part of Certara), an early leader in computational chemistry; and in chemical analysis at Dionex (now part of ThermoFisher). Originally trained as a geochemist (BA Geology, Macalester College; M.S. Geology, Washington State University), he managed to make the unlikely yet homophonic switch from rocks to ROCS^®. Jeff lives in San Francisco but travels regularly to Santa Fe to get his green chile rations, oh, and visit HQ.

Jharrod LaFon

Vice President, R&D