Jonathon Vandezande

I'm the director of computational chemistry at Rowan, where we are building ML-accelerated computational chemistry tools for drug design and materials science.

I studied computational catalysis with Henry F. Schaefer III at UGA and did a post-doc in the same with Frank Neese at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung. I then detoured into polymer chemistry, running an applied R&D lab at 1st Source Research developing novel coatings, adhesives, and bio-derived materials. I joined Zymergen, where I led computational screening of bio-advantaged chemicals for use in novel materials, and then the Schrödinger materials science department as the lead scientist for molecular QM methods and workflows. I joined Rowan as employee #1 in 2024.