John D. MacCuish — President

John received a BA in fine art and a BA in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1977. After spending 12 years in the visual arts, John changed careers and received his MS in computer science from Indiana University in 1992, where his research interests were graph theory, algorithm animation, and scientific visualization. After graduating from Indiana University, he worked as a graduate research assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, while pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of New Mexico. At Los Alamos, he worked on numerous projects, such as the IRS Fraud Detection of Electronic Returns Project; LINK, a software workbench for combinatorics; and parallel implementations of cluster algorithms for image processing. In 1996 he received a Distinguished Performance Award for his work on the IRS Fraud Detection Project. In 1996, John left the laboratory to become an employee of the Center for Adaptive Systems Applications (CASA) located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. There his primary duties were data mining and statistical modeling applications. Some of the projects where he was the technical lead were credit card fraud detection, mailing response models, and statistical modeling for precision agriculture.

After leaving CASA John worked at Bioreason which is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For Bioreason John worked in the areas of anomaly detection, data mining, and basic research. Bioreason is a firm that develops automated reasoning systems for drug discovery. John is an co-author for patent applications and several publications. John started Mesa Analytics & Computing in the spring of 1999.

John has published numerous articles and technical reports on graph theory, algorithm animation, scientific visualization, image processing, cheminfomatics, and data mining. He also wrote or contributed to many internal and confidential reports on fraud detection, image recognition, precision agriculture, economic modeling, queuing theory models, and cheminformatics.

Dr. Norah MacCuish — CSO

Dr. MacCuish received her B.A. degree in Chemistry from the University of Chicago. She received her M.S. and her Ph.D. from Cornell University in the field of Theoretical Physical Chemistry. Her educational training included experimental and theoretical work in the areas of ultrafast laser spectroscopy, spectroscopic simulation of fluids and synthetic organic chemistry and biochemistry.

After graduating from Cornell Norah did her post-doctoral work at Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals, a division of the Warner-Lambert Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a post-doc in the Biomolecular Structure and Drug Design group, Norah worked in such areas as Diversity Assessment for compound acquisitions and structural diversity analysis of compound leads from HTS (High Throughput Screening). After finishing her post-doctoral studies, Norah took a Scientist position with the Computational Chemistry Group at Smith Kline Beecham in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. While at SmithKline Norah was inolved with therapeutic project teams, combinatorial library design and data integration projects. She received a Smith Kline Bronze Impact Award for her collaborative work involving a Smith Kline Pharmaceutical Partnership. Norah left Smith Kline to further her career in cheminformatics by joining Daylight Chemical Information Systems in 1997 as a Chemical Information Systems specialist.

While at Daylight Norah gained expertise in Chemical Information systems representation and querying tools and also object-relational database systems. She lead sessions at Daylight’s User group meetings, taught training sessions for new customers to the Daylight systems, developed enhancements and new products in the areas of web based chemical tools and object-relational technology. Norah also supported and lead several research collaborations with various pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies who were either partners or customers of Daylight, CIS. Norah has several publications and has made scientific presentations in the areas of Fluid Simulations, Chemical Diversity Analysis, Object-relational Database systems, and Chemical Cluster Analysis. She was the Principal Investigator for the two Phase I NSF SBIR grants as well as a Phase II NSF SBIR titled 'Cheminformatics Teaching Tools for the Cheminformatics Virtual Classroom’, Grant No. 0450457.

Mitch Chapman — VP Software Engineering

In 1986 Mitch earned a BSCS, Magna Cum Laude, in Computer Science from Wright State University. Subsequently he worked for six years in the aerospace industry, providing software support for human-aircraft interface research at Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, OH; and for automated testing of electronic flight control systems for Saab Military Aircraft in Sweden.

Mitch joined Ohio Electronic Engravers, Inc. in 1993. While there he developed graphical user interfaces for control of rotogravure equipment and for soft-realtime visualization of prepress layouts. He also developed object persistence frameworks for C++ and multi-threaded drivers for widebody inkjet printers.

In 1999 Mitch became a senior software engineer at Bioreason, where he helped create GUI applications to aid in the analysis of biological and chemistry screening data. Shortly after joining the company he performed usability studies which shifted the company’s product focus from unguided browsing to interactive search and filtering. He also helped reduce the computational complexity of Bioreason’s core structure analysis algorithms.

From 2004-2005 at Prediction Company Mitch was involved in development and maintenance of user interfaces for realtime monitoring and control of stock trading systems.

Mitch joined the Mesa staff in March, 2005, becoming the lead software engineer. He manages Mesa’s revision control, problem-tracking and build systems, and develops custom dynamic web applications. He continues to develop new user interfaces for cheminformatics applications.