Pat Walters is Chief Scientist at OpenADMET, an open science initiative that combines insights from high-throughput experimentation, structural biology, and machine learning to improve the prediction of drug absorption, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity. Before his current role, Pat spent thirty years in leadership positions at Relay Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

Jonathan Essex obtained his undergraduate and D.Phil. degrees from the University of Oxford, working with Prof Graham Richards. He took up an SERC/NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship in the group of Prof Bill Jorgensen at Yale University in 1992. In 1994 he returned to the UK to the University of Southampton as a Royal Society University Research Fellow, where he has remained ever since. He was appointed Lecturer in 1997, Senior Lecturer in 2001, Reader in 2005 and to a Personal Chair in 2007. His research involves the development and application of classical molecular simulation approaches to biological systems, with a particular interest in binding free energy calculations. He collaborates extensively with the pharmaceutical industry.