Short Bio

John Irwin is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California San Francisco. He works together with Brian Shoichet on methods to discover new chemistry for biological targets using 2D (ligand-based) and 3D (docking) methods. He applies these methods to various projects, and particiates in numerous collaborations.
 
John develops the ZINC database of commercially available compounds for virtual screening and the DUD database for benchmarking virtual screening methods. His most recent product is DOCK Blaster, a free virtual screening service that aims to make docking as reliable and easy to use - if not nearly as fast - as BLAST.
 
John received his Ph.D. for work with Jack Dunitz in chemical crystallography in 1991 at ETH Zurich. He worked at a startup molecular modeling company before joining Gerard Bricogne's group at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge UK, developing software for new macromolecular crystallographic structure solution and refinement methods (BUSTER and SHARP). He spent a year and a half as a staff scientist at EMBL-EBI also in Cambridge working on the PDB cleanup project before moving to Northwestern University Medical School with Brian Shoichet in 2000 where he began work on DOCK, ZINC, and SEA.