Esben Bjerrum
Principal Research Scientist II, AI ML Team Lead at AbbVie
Gothenburg, Sweden
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolEsben Bjerrum is a Principal Research Scientist and AI/ML team lead with 10+ years of experience applying machine learning to drug discovery, from deep generative design to reaction informatics and automated retrosynthesis. He has led R&D teams at AstraZeneca and Odyssey Therapeutics, published novel SMILES-based reinforcement learning techniques, and co-founded the open-source Scikit-Mol project to advance ML and QSAR tooling. As a founder of cheminformania and prior CEO of Wildcard Pharmaceutical Consulting, he combines hands-on model development with product-minded consulting across Europe. His background spans computational chemistry, protein NMR, and chemometrics, giving him rare domain fluency that bridges laboratory science and production ML. Based in Gothenburg, he now drives AI strategy at AbbVie while continuing to contribute open-source tools that accelerate de novo molecular design. An unexpected thread in his career is repeated success transitioning academic methods (e.g., SMILES augmentation, Chemformer-style approaches) into industry-grade pipelines.
10 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biochemistry Unit Department of Biophysics, Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biochemistry Unit Department of Biophysics at University of OxfordPh.D Pharm. Computational Chemistry, Ph.D Pharm. Computational Chemistry at The Danish University of Pharmaceutical SciencesCopenhagen Business SchoolScholarship student Medical Pharmacology, Scholarship student Medical Pharmacology at Department of Medical Pharmacology, Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research. Netherlands
English, Danish, Russian, German
Github Skills (52)
lstm-neural-networks10
molecule10
recurrent10
python10
pyside10
rdkit10
recurrent-neural-networks10
gui-editor10
cheminformatics10
enumeration9
vectorization9
lstm9
drug-discovery8
scikit8
scikit-learn8
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
EBjerrum/scikit-mol
Sep 2022 - Dec 2022
scikit-learn classes for molecular vectorization using RDKit
Contributions:8 releases, 33 reviews, 20 commits in 3 months
rdkitpythondata-sciencemachine-learningmolecular
EBjerrum/rdkit
Jan 2016 - Aug 2024
The official sources for the RDKit library
Contributions:2 PRs, 7 pushes, 2 branches in 8 years 8 months
rdkitsolidworkssystems-programmingrdmasources
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