Organization
Materials Design, Inc.
Paul Saxe
Profile
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BiographyDr. Paul Saxe started his career in quantum chemistry, receiving his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1982 under the guidance of Henry F “Fritz” Schaefer III. His work focused primarily on method development, pioneering some of the early implementations of e.g. SCF second derivatives and CI gradients. He continued this work at an NRC/NAS postdoctoral position with the Ballistics Research Lab (now the Army Research Lab) in Aberdeen, MD and then as a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Lab. In 1987 he moved to a startup company BioDesign, started by Prof Bill Goddard of Caltech, switching his focus to molecular dynamics for drug design, polymer as well as materials applications. In 1990 he moved to Biosym, managing all the computational codes which ranged from Discover, the leading commercial MD code, to quantum codes such as DMol and Turbomole. Biosym and BioDesign — now MSI — subsequently merged to for Accelrys which is now Biovia, a part of Dassault Systemes.
Dr. Saxe along with Drs. Erich Wimmer and John Harris left Biosym/MSI in 1998 to found Materials Design with the explicit goal of creating a complete suite of atomistic modeling tools for materials science and engineering. Materials Design has grown to 28 employees in the US and Europe. MedeA, which is a comprehensive environment for atomistic modeling, is used worldwide at about 400 sites, including about 100 industrial companies in areas ranging from energy — nuclear and oil & gas — automotive, aerospace, chemical and electronics industries, with applications to metallurgy, corrosion, catalysis, semiconductors, polymers, fluids, etc.