Cadence Molecular Sciences (OpenEye) (CMS)—a business unit of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. Corporate Vice President, Anthony Nicholls, PhD, has announced his retirement as of January, 2025.
Dr. Nicholls founded OpenEye Scientific Software in 1997 and served as Chief Executive Officer before it was acquired by Cadence in 2022. During his tenure, Dr. Nicholls grew the Santa Fe-based company to over a hundred and fifty employees, producing a wide range of impactful scientific solutions aimed at advancing computation in drug discovery. The solutions comprise best-in-class algorithms such as ROCS®, OMEGA, EON, BROOD, OEChem TK and span desktop applications, toolkits and OpenEye’s flagship SaaS offering, Orion®, the leading cloud-based molecular design platform.
Anthony Nicholls, Outgoing Corporate Vice President
“Over 25 years I grew OpenEye to where it could be merged with a company like Cadence to produce OpenEye, Cadence Molecular Sciences. There is no doubt this is a strong company with a great mission and great people and a great host company who is committed to life sciences,” said Anthony Nicholls, Outgoing Corporate Vice President. “I leave the company with an extremely strong portfolio of science and technology. 2025 is going to be an amazing year for you.”
Video: A Special Announcement from Anthony Nicholls, PhD
Geoff Skillman, MD, PhD, Vice President of Research & Development, will serve as head of the OpenEye, Cadence Molecular Sciences business unit. As Chief Science Officer and Director at OpenEye Scientific Software, Dr. Skillman led scientific development and was responsible for drug discovery products spanning SAAS workflows, desktop applications and programming toolkits.
Dr. Skillman has been an entrepreneur, scientist and developer for 24 years. During that time, in addition to inventing several generative molecular-design algorithms, he was part of the team that wrote the industry’s premier cheminformatics and molecular modeling toolkit. Dr. Skillman studied chemistry at Stanford and earned an MD degree and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from UC, San Francisco.
Geoff Skillman, PhD, Vice President of Research & Development
Continuing to serve alongside Dr. Skillman on the executive team are Jeff Grandy, leading the commercial organization, and Jharrod LaFon, leading the development organization.
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Jeff Grandy, Vice President, Commercial Leader
Jharrod LaFon, Vice President of Research & Development
Taking over leadership of scientific advancement are Jesper Sørensen, PhD, Head of Scientific Development and David LeBard, PhD, Head of Science.
Jesper Sørensen, PhD, Head of Scientific Development
David LeBard, PhD, Head of Science
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