Russell Davidson
Research Software Engineer Research Programmer at Institute of Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Urbana-Champaign Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRussell Davidson is a Research Software Engineer with a Ph.D. in Chemistry and over a decade of experience applying computational chemistry and molecular modeling to real-world problems. He transitioned from Ph.D. work at Colorado State University to a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he led high-throughput docking, pose-refinement, and workflow development that helped identify covalent inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 PLpro. Russell builds end-to-end pipelines combining deep learning structure prediction (AlphaFold), molecular simulation (OpenMM, AMBER), and structural search tools to annotate proteomes at scale, and he’s comfortable running those workflows from laptops to national HPC systems. He mentors and teaches regularly, translating complex methods into reproducible scripts and tools for interdisciplinary teams spanning chemistry, biochemistry, and virology. His research curiosity centers on protein evolution and allostery, and he’s passionate about Open Science and leveraging big data for environmental and global health impact. An often-overlooked strength is his practical focus on metadata transfer between predicted and experimental structures to make functional annotations immediately useful to wet-lab collaborators.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Chemistry, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Chemistry at Colorado State UniversityBachelor's of Science, Chemistry, 3.397, Bachelor's of Science, Chemistry, 3.397 at Elon University
Github Skills (25)
molecule10
biology10
structural-biology10
protein-data-bank10
crystallography10
pdb10
protein-structure10
blender10
nodes10
proteins10
addon10
torque9
sequence8
bioinformatics7
similarity7
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
EnzymeFunctionInitiative/ENA_Database_Build
Feb 2025 - Apr 2025
Code used to download and process the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) database.
Contributions:21 reviews, 3 PRs, 106 pushes in 1 month
EnzymeFunctionInitiative/EFIToolsKBase
Oct 2024 - Apr 2025
Make EFITools available on KBase
Contributions:16 reviews, 21 PRs, 113 pushes in 5 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.