Patrick Avery
Technical Leader at Kitware Inc.
Naperville, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPatrick Avery is a technical leader at Kitware with 11 years of experience building scientific visualization and data analysis software for materials science, X-ray diffraction, tomography, and simulation workflows. He blends a PhD-level chemistry background with full-stack engineering, driving features from low-level file parsers (Open Babel, POSCAR support) to interactive web visualization (vtk-js camera manipulators and first-person controls). At Kitware he has progressed from R&D engineer to Technical Leader, leading plugins and tooling in ParaView and advancing the Avogadro/Avogadrolibs ecosystem used across computational chemistry and materials modeling. Patrick is a pragmatic problem-solver who routinely tackles memory leaks, cross-platform build issues, and user interaction refinements, and he often contributes subtle but impactful fixes such as clone semantics and clipboard import capabilities. Based in Naperville, IL, he pairs domain expertise in chemistry with a hands-on open-source mindset, making complex scientific tools more reliable and usable for researchers.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Chemistry, Bachelor of Science (BS) Chemistry at Bob Jones UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Chemistry, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Chemistry at University at Buffalo
Stackoverflow
16reputation
141reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (34)
javascript10
visualization10
c-language10
qt10
paraview10
user-interface10
cmake10
computational-chemistry10
file-parsing10
file-format10
camera10
parsing10
front-end-development10
cheminformatics10
file-parser10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
OpenChemistry/avogadrolibs
Mar 2016 - Jul 2021
Avogadro libraries provide 3D rendering, visualization, analysis and data processing useful in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:123 commits, 66 PRs, 183 comments in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Patrick primarily contributed to improving the Avogadro libraries by fixing bugs, addressing memory leaks, and enhancing functionality. They fixed a misspelling, addressed memory leaks in an assignment operator, and added a clone function to the BasisSet class. The user also fixed a bug for transforming atoms and implemented POSCAR format reader and writer, and added a clipboard import feature.
compchempythonc-plus-plussimulationbioinformatics
cryos/avogadro
Aug 2015 - Nov 2017
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:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 commits, 27 PRs, 51 comments in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Patrick primarily contributed to the enhancement and maintenance of the Avogadro codebase, focusing on computational chemistry and molecular modeling. Their commits included improvements to the CMake build system, particularly concerning the handling of external libraries like Eigen. They also updated and modified the libmsym library, including changes to the permutation and symmetry extension modules to ensure compatibility and address compiler warnings. Furthermore, the user was involved in fixing POSCAR reading functionality and adding features related to plotting.
openchemistrychemistrysciencemolecularbioinformatics
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