Researcher who builds

I work in the seam between research and engineering: I publish the science, then I build the systems that put it in other people's hands. For the chemical and life sciences, that has meant turning hard recognition problems into services people can actually rely on.

As lead architect of DECIMER.ai, I built an end-to-end platform that reads chemical structures out of the printed literature and returns machine-readable data. With the team at the Steinbeck lab, FSU Jena, I co-developed COCONUT, the largest freely available database of open natural products, rebuilt as a curated, FAIR-by-design service. As a Google TPU Research Cloud Fellow, I train these models at scale, and the work was recognized with the CSA Trust Award in 2025 for open-science leadership.

Open science is the through-line. I would rather ship a tool that a chemist in another lab can use tomorrow than guard a clever result, so everything is built on FAIR data principles, released openly, and maintained for the long run. Alongside the code, I teach: I have designed AI/ML training programs and mentored eleven graduate students toward the same habit of building carefully and sharing widely.