Open to work
Computational Biologist · Scientific Programmer
Steven R. Ness, Ph.D.
Thirty years turning hard science into working software — from crystallography pipelines used by 100+ labs to AI that designs proteins and decodes the songs of orcas.
📍 Victoria, British Columbia, Canada · Remote / Hybrid
Profile
An interdisciplinary scientific programmer and computational biologist with a Ph.D. in Computer Science and over three decades driving high-impact research, product, and AI-powered biotech. I pair deep domain expertise in structural biology and protein–ligand docking with hands-on machine-learning and software-engineering leadership — building end-to-end systems that put generative models, GPU-accelerated molecular viewers, and real experimental feedback in the same loop.
Signature Work
doi.bio 2025 →
A distributed scientific knowledge platform — linking literature, structures, and AI agents into one navigable graph for drug discovery.
folding.ai 2021–25
Intelligence-augmentation for protein design: generative models coupled to GPU molecular viewers to triage and design novel therapeutics.
CRANK Leiden
GPL-licensed automated structure-solution pipeline, shipped in CCP4 and used by 100+ labs worldwide. Published in Structure.
Gamma U Alberta
Molecular-docking engine driven by a genetic-algorithm optimizer, with a 3D molecular viewer built on SGI Open Inventor.
The Orchive 17 yrs
Data-mined 20,000+ hours of orca recordings from OrcaLab into a web archive with ML-assisted annotation and retrieval.
Customer 360 Salesforce
Founding member & UI lead of the Customer 360 tiger team; service-mesh (Envoy/Istio) and master-data orchestration at scale.
Experience
Founder — doi.bio
Self-employed · scientific knowledge platform
- Building a distributed platform that links scientific literature, protein structures, and AI agents into a single navigable knowledge graph.
Founder & CEO — folding.ai
AI-driven protein design startup
- Prototyped generative and deep-learning models for AI-driven protein design, with custom evaluation metrics tied directly to wet-lab success.
- Integrated GPU-accelerated molecular viewers with model inference to triage and design candidate therapeutics end-to-end.
Lead Member of Technical Staff — Salesforce
Einstein Voice · Service Mesh · Customer 360 (incl. Quip, 2020–21)
- Founding member & UI Team Lead of the Customer 360 tiger team; presented demos to Salesforce founders and EVPs; shipped Customer 360 Data Manager, now serving millions of profiles.
- Delivered production Envoy proxy and partnered with Istio to deploy service-mesh infrastructure for Hyperforce / Customer 360.
- Built an AI voice assistant (Einstein Voice / MetaMind) integrated with Salesforce core; earned the Salesforce CTO Award.
Ph.D. & M.Sc. Researcher — University of Victoria
Computer Science · bioacoustics & music information retrieval
- Led the Orchive: data-mined a 20,000+ hour bioacoustic archive with semi-automatic annotation and ML classification of killer-whale calls.
- Published across ISMIR, IEEE GlobalSIP, and ACM Multimedia; devised benchmark classification metrics for large audio corpora.
Software Engineering Intern — Google
News Performance Team · Research (Human Auditory Models)
- Cut end-to-end Google News latency ~33% for users on slow connections; built a JS API for real-time performance monitoring.
- Built electronic models of the human auditory system and ran experiments over thousands of music videos on Google infrastructure.
Senior Software Developer — Priologic Software
EasyRTC — open-source WebRTC SDKs
- Developed EasyRTC server/client SDKs for web, iOS, and Android.
Scientific Programmer — Leiden University
Designed CRANK — GPL crystallographic structure-solution platform, shipped in CCP4 and used by 100+ labs (Tcl, C, Fortran, Shell).
Senior Programmer — BC Genome Sciences Centre
Parallelized the FPC physical-mapping platform; coordinated restriction-map efforts for the mouse, rat, and cow genomes (contributor, Nature mouse-genome map).
Software Develoepr — Stormix - Storm Linux
Worked on the graphical splash screen for bootup by modifying the linux kernel. Helped develop the USB subsystem that detected devices.
Structural-Biology Software DeveloperUBC
Developed Dockcam a 3D viewer for Dockvision. Helped solve crystal structures. Setup the computing infrastructure of the lab.
Structural-Biology Software Developer — U Alberta
Co-developer on Dockvision. Created Gamma, a genetic-algorithm molecular-docking program with a 3D Open Inventor viewer; ran structural-biochemistry labs and systems (SGI/IRIX, C/C++, Fortran 77).
Software DeveloperAlberta Enviromental Research Center
Developed Turbo Pascal software. UI speedups I found were implemented in production.
Core Competencies
Programming & DevOps
AI & Data Science
Structural Biology
Bioinformatics & Cloud
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science
University of Victoria
M.Sc., Computer Science
University of Victoria
B.Sc., Biochemistry
University of Victoria
Selected Publications & Patents
A selection across structural biology, genomics, and machine learning. Full list on Google Scholar ↗.
A physical map of the mouse genome · 2002
Gregory, Sekhon, Schein … Ness et al. — Nature 418 (6899)
CRANK: new methods for automated macromolecular crystal structure solution · 2005
Ness SR, de Graaff RAG, Abrahams JP, Pannu NS — Structure 12 (10)
Structure-Based Design Guides Improved Efficacy of Deacylation Transition-State Analogue Inhibitors of TEM-1 β-Lactamase · 2000
Ness S, Martin R, Kindler AM … et al. — Biochemistry 39 (18)
ORCA-SLANG: Multi-Stage Semi-Supervised Deep Learning for Large-Scale Killer-Whale Call-Type Identification
Bergler, Schmitt, Maier … Ness SR et al. — Interspeech
Assembly of fingerprint contigs: parallelized FPC · 2002
Ness SR, Terpstra W, Krzywinski M, Marra MA, Jones SJM — Bioinformatics 18 (3)
Integrated Entity View Across Distributed Systems · US 10,936,582 B2
Master-data federation · granted 2021
User Interface for Commerce Architecture · US 11,442,952 B2
Low-code composable storefront UI · granted 2023
Honours & Community
Awards & Honours
- NSERC CGS-D Doctoral Scholarship, University of Victoria
- Salesforce CTO Award — New Customer Experience
- National Science Fair — Best Senior Project & multiple Gold Medals (Canada)
Community & Leadership
- Mentor, How to Grow Almost Anything — MIT Media Lab / Ginkgo Bioworks (2025)
- Speaker — ICML Workshop, ISMIR, CCP4 Study Weekend, Dockvision
- President, Society for Indian Classical Arts, UVic; Lead Developer & Scientist, The Orchive (17 yrs)