About
About Chemetrian
We founded Chemetrian after experiencing firsthand what it takes to apply AI/ML to synthetic chemistry as experimentalists. Weeks lost stitching together poorly maintained academic packages, debugging environments instead of running experiments, and translating between the languages of chemistry and machine learning. And before any of that, months of self-study just to begin. The irony was hard to miss: the tool promising to speed up science was costing us more time than it saved. There had to be a better way. So we built it.
What drives us
Accelerating science that changes lives
When every chemist applies ML in their workflows, pharmaceutical R & D, energy research, and materials discovery would move faster than ever before. The breakthroughs we need most — cheaper drugs, cleaner energy, better materials — shouldn’t be bottlenecked.
Built for every chemist
Whether you’re a bench chemist running your first model or a computational chemist tired of maintaining fragile pipelines, Chemetrian integrates into your workflow without the overhead. No environment setup, no reinventing the wheel.
Equipping the next generation
The chemists entering the workforce today will spend their careers working alongside AI. Chemetrian gives students hands-on experience applying ML to real chemical problems, without the setup burden that makes it inaccessible in a classroom.
The Team
Built by researchers, for researchers
Our team combines deep expertise in chemistry, machine learning, and software engineering.
Antonio LaPorte, PhD
B.S. Chemistry · North Central College · Ph.D. Chemistry · UIUC · Post-Doc · Harvard
Antonio is an organic chemist who expanded into automation, quantum calculations, and machine learning for small molecule discovery and optimization. He completed his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Prof. Marty Burke’s group and is a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Eric Jacobsen’s group at Harvard. Having seen firsthand how ML can accelerate science, he founded Chemetrian to put those tools in every chemist’s hands.
Simron Patel
B.S. Computer Science · Purdue
Simron brings diverse experience building and deploying industrial ML products across NLP, recommendation systems, and classical approaches. Recently, his research with Prof. Manling Li’s group at Northwestern University explores how structure-aware representations, vision language models, and reinforcement learning enable more efficient and effective reasoning for AI. Simron is driven by the simple belief that scientists should be able to wield the most powerful tools in modern research.
David Ashley
B.S. Economics & CS · DePaul
David brings a decade of software engineering experience, including building and managing cloud compute infrastructures for Fortune 500 companies. As Head of Engineering at Chemetrian, he leads the architecture and development of the platform from scalable backend systems to the interfaces that make complex chemistry workflows feel effortless. He has also become quite a computational chemist. For David, doing great engineering only means something when it’s pointed at a problem worth solving.
Jose Vazquez
B.S. Computer Science · DePaul
Jose is a senior full-stack developer with a background building high-performance products in the gaming industry, one of the most demanding environments for real-time, responsive systems. At Chemetrian, he works across the stack; from architecting feature systems between services to crafting the interfaces chemists use every day. He cares deeply about design and the details that most people overlook.
Marcus LaPorte
B.S. Chemistry · North Central College · M.S. Chemical Engineering · Northwestern
Marcus started his research career as an organic chemist and completed his master’s research in chemical engineering at Northwestern University in John Torkelson’s lab, where he worked on design and synthesis of recyclable polymers. He went on to apply that foundation at GE Research, contributing to process development, engineering, and scale-up of sorbents for carbon capture and water harvesting. Marcus then transitioned into marketing and sales for engineering software, leading campaigns across multiple media platforms. At Chemetrian, Marcus leads marketing while also advising on materials science and engineering applications of the platform. Chemetrian is where his love for materials science and scientific storytelling converge on a single mission to solve the challenges that define our generation.