Chris Gessner
Director Data Science
United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChris Gessner is a Director of Data Science and seasoned cheminformatics developer with nearly two decades of experience translating complex biological and chemical problems into scalable AI and software solutions across academia, pharma, and chemical information industries. He specializes in graph AI, graph RAG LLMs, and graph databases (neo4j, Katana, TigerGraph, Neptune) to accelerate early drug and target discovery, precision medicine, and pharmacovigilance, and he architects cloud-native deployments using AWS and SageMaker. His technical fluency spans low-level languages (C/C++, Java, C#) to modern ML stacks (PyTorch, DGL) and cheminformatics toolkits (RDKit, CDK, OpenEye), enabling end-to-end pipelines from algorithm design to production. A pragmatic leader, he has held senior roles at Data2Discovery, Katana Graph, AbbVie, Zymergen, and CAS, bridging domain scientists and engineers to deliver interdisciplinary solutions. He also brings deep experience with NoSQL/XML databases, big data platforms (Hadoop/Spark), and software lifecycle practices (RUP, Scrum), which helps him move prototypes into robust, auditable systems. Unusually for someone at his level, he pairs hands-on low-level programming and cheminformatics algorithm design with strategic product and solution leadership.
10 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
University of California, San DiegoMaster of Science - MS Data Science, Master of Science - MS Data Science at Indiana University BloomingtonBachelor of Science - BS Biochemistry, Bachelor of Science - BS Biochemistry at Brigham Young University–HawaiiGithub contributions (2)
crgessne/I590-Projects-BigData-Software
Feb 2016 - Feb 2016
Contributions:1 push, 2 branches in 5 days
IUIDSL/kgap_lincs-idg
Jul 2020 - Dec 2020
Contributions:8 commits, 8 pushes in 5 months
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