Meet our Leadership Team

A. Geoffrey Skillman

Vice President, R&D, Business Unit Head

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

David LeBard

Head of Science

David LeBard earned a B.S. in Biochemistry and B.A. in German at Arizona State University in 2004 and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry in 2008 at the same university studying protein electron transfer theory under Dmitry Matyushov. After a postdoc with Michael Klein at the University of Pennsylvania & Temple University working on problems of protein-ligand binding and micellar self-assembly, David accepted a tenure track faculty position in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Yeshiva University. A few years running a small lab and teaching turned David into a mad man, so he left academia for an industry position at a well-known NYC company to work on free energy perturbation calculations and MD simulation methods. Finally coming to his senses, David left New York in 2016 and now oversees the science teams here at OpenEye. If David is not doing science, playing chess, reading, writing code, watching the Arizona Diamondbacks or any other Arizona-based team, then check his pulse, he’s probably dead.

Jesper Sørensen

Head of Scientific Development

When Dart NeuroScience folded in 2017, Openeye booked Jesper in a blink, to enrich its development team with biomolecular modeling knowledge. Needless to say, his extensive desire to push OEToolkits to the limit while at Dart, might have played a small role in his hiring – if even just to give the guys in support a well-deserved break. In academia, Jesper was trained as a computational chemist, using tools like molecular dynamics simulations to, among other things, engineer enzymes used in industrial cheese production with the aim to augment their rate and specificity. His work rewarded him with a PhD in Nanotechnology from Aarhus University in Denmark. When not thinking about proteins, he spends his time rigging his house for better automation – it is only fitting that Jesper would want to live in a well “prepped” home.