Geoffrey Hutchison
Professor at Avogadro Project
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGeoffrey Hutchison is a professor of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh with 24 years of experience designing molecular and nanoscale electronic materials that bridge chemical synthesis, characterization, and computational modeling. He founded and continues to develop major open-source tools for chemistry—most notably Open Babel and Avogadro—which are widely used for molecular data translation, visualization, and analysis across the community. His research group focuses on building electronic materials from organic and inorganic molecular subunits, pairing hands-on lab work with theoretical simulation to tune properties at the nanoscale. Beyond academia, his sustained backend contributions to projects like cclib and avogadrolibs show deep expertise in parsers, algorithms, and C++/Qt-based visualization, reflecting a rare blend of publishing, teaching, and impactful open-source engineering.
24 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Chemistry, PhD, Chemistry at Northwestern UniversityBA, Chemistry, BA, Chemistry at Williams College
Stackoverflow
444reputation
38kreached
9answers
2questions
Github Skills (27)
visualization10
c-language10
parser10
qt10
python10
computational-chemistry10
chemistry10
parsing10
front-end-development10
parse10
data-extraction10
visualizations10
cprogramming-language10
scientific-computing10
modeling10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
cryos/avogadro
Apr 2006 - Jul 2018
Avogadro 1 is not under active development, the repository was archived in September 2021. Development of Avogadro 2 is being done at https://github.com/openchemistry/avogadrolibs. Avogadro is an advanced molecular editor designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 1680 commits, 79 PRs in 12 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Geoffrey primarily contributed to the Avogadro molecular editor project by implementing and modifying features related to the handling and visualization of molecular structures. Their commits focused on adding shortcuts to UI elements, incorporating new functionality for building and displaying chemical structures, and addressing bugs related to the display and manipulation of molecules and unit cells. The user demonstrated proficiency in C++ and the use of Qt framework.
openchemistrychemistrysciencemolecularbioinformatics
openbabel/openbabel
Nov 2001 - Aug 2022
Open Babel is a chemical toolbox designed to speak the many languages of chemical data.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Algorithm Specialist
Back-end Developer & Algorithm SpecialistContributions:7 releases, 17 reviews, 2938 commits in 20 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Geoffrey made significant contributions to the Open Babel library, focusing on enhancements to the internal representation and parsing of chemical structures. Their work involved implementing improved atom and bond handling, including the addition of a class for storing vector data and features for handling isotopic data. The user also introduced fixes and optimizations to existing parsing routines, particularly those related to the identification of and handling of aromatic and ring-based bonds, likely improving the accuracy of Open Babel's chemical structure analysis.
chemical-datacheminformaticsbabelchemistrytoolbox
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