Personal History
John Joseph Irwin grew up in Toronto, Canada on Drysdale Crescent, Willowdale between 1963 and 1977, apart from a year out in Oxford, England where he lived on Clover Close in Cumnor Hill, a couple of miles west of the city centre. The son of M. Eleanor Gray and John W. Irwin, he has three younger siblings, Marjorie, Peter, and Andrew.
In Toronto, he attended Cresthaven Drive Public School. In Oxford, he attended Matthew Arnold Comprehensive School. Back in Toronto, he spent a year at Zion Heights Junior High School before going to The Toronto French School for the rest of high school. It was during high school that he developed an interest in chemistry, particularly drugs and explosives. The family moved to Bayview Ridge also in Willowdale in 1977.
John attended the University of Toronto. He spent a year in Engineering Science, followed by three years in Chemistry and Biochemistry whence he graduated with a BSc. He did a fourth year project in Inorganic Chemistry with David H. Farrar, and continued to do an MSc with him.
John joined Jack Dunitz's lab at ETH in Zurich (Zuerich) Switzerland where he completed a PhD in Organic Chemistry and Chemical Crystallography. John met his future wife, Susanne Irwin, during his studies.
John worked as a Product Line Manager at Biostructure SA, a startup company in Strasbourg (Illkirch-Graffenstaden), France making molecular modelling software. 1991-1993.
John joined Gerard Bricogne's group at the MRC LMB in Cambridge England where he worked for 4 1/2 years helping to develop the BUSTER and SHARP programs for macromolecular structure solution and refinement. John helped to launch the company Global Phasing Ltd, and also ran his own IT and bioinformatics consulting business, Innovatis Ltd, during his time in Cambridge. It was during his time in Cambridge that John joined the local organizing committee of the International School of Crystallography. John and Susanne were delighted to have their first child, Raphael, born in the fall of 1994.
John spent 1 1/2 years at the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) where he worked in the Macromolecular Structural Database group helping to convert and clean up the PDB database into Oracle. The family moved to Newton, south of Cambridge, next to the Queen's head, where they spent a very happy 20 months. John and Susanne were overjoyed to have their second child, Gabriel, born shortly before they moved to the US.
John joined Brian Shoichet's lab at Northwestern U in Chicago in the summer of 2000, and went with the lab to UCSF in the spring of 2003. John has been working on a variety of computer-aided drug design projects, including most recently the database ZINC, the DOCK Blaster virtual screening service, among other projects.
John, Susanne, Raphael and Gabriel are enjoying living in relaxed and sunny Marin County, California. They like to go to the beach, swim, cycle and otherwise enjoy the wonders of nature. Susanne has recently started Lingua Marin, a German Language School in Marin County.
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