Dan Nealschneider
Senior Director at Schrödinger
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDan Nealschneider is a senior software leader and Tech Lead for Scientific Infrastructure at Schrödinger, driving the quality, performance, and longevity of core chemistry libraries used across drug and materials discovery tools. With a decade-plus career blending physical chemistry (M.S., UC Berkeley) and production-grade software engineering, he specializes in C++, Python, SWIG, and automated testing to make scientific code robust and performant across diverse chemistries and scales. He has risen through roles from QA and test developer to Senior Director, pairing deep domain knowledge of ultrafast reaction simulation with hands-on stewardship of build systems and test suites. An active contributor to RDKit, Dan has improved core algorithms (SSSR), stereo handling, and build stability in one of the field’s most widely used cheminformatics libraries. He brings a curious operator’s background—teaching, volunteer coordination, and experimental optics—into pragmatic leadership that values correctness, speed, and reproducible science. Based in Portland, he balances open source contributions with maintaining proprietary chemistry infrastructure at production scale.
10 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
M.S., Physical Chemistry, M.S., Physical Chemistry at University of California, BerkeleyPullman High SchoolB.S., Chemistry, B.S., Chemistry at University of Puget Sound
Stackoverflow
13,542reputation
3.1mreached
107answers
41questions
loops
top-5%
pytest
top-1%
unit-testing
top-1%
python
top-1%
user-input
top-5%
nested-loops
top-5%
Github Skills (26)
algorithm10
unit-testing10
algorithms10
c-language10
pytest10
python10
rdkit10
data-structure10
cheminformatics10
data-structures10
assert10
cprogramming-language10
sublime-text9
javascript9
git9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
rdkit/rdkit
May 2018 - Jan 2023
The official sources for the RDKit library
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:94 reviews, 41 commits, 49 PRs in 4 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Dan primarily contributed to the RDKit library, addressing issues related to C++ code and the library's core functionality. Their work included bug fixes, such as correcting file download fallbacks, as well as the addition of features like enhanced stereo read/write support in SDF files. The user also implemented improvements such as optimizations to speed up the Simple Subset of Smallest Rings (SSSR) algorithm and enhancements to the substructure search and SMARTS functionalities. Furthermore, they resolved build warnings and other minor compilation issues.
cheminformaticsrdkitpythonc-plus-plussources
schrodinger/coordgenlibs
Feb 2019 - Sep 2022
Contributions:14 releases, 40 reviews, 46 commits in 3 years 6 months
coordinateschrodinger
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