Colton Hicks
Founder & CEO at Astera Institute
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolColton Hicks is a PhD candidate in theoretical chemistry at Stanford and a nine-year software engineering veteran who builds cloud-native, high-performance systems that accelerate molecular design. He blends deep wet-lab experience (HPLC, LC-MS, high-throughput liquid handlers) with production-grade engineering—Python, Docker, AWS, CI/CD, Django, React, and distributed compute—to bridge experimental workflows and scalable data platforms. At Stanford he leads next-generation cloud and big-data tools for quantum chemistry and was previously a senior engineer architecting ETL and distributed systems at Q Bio and automated trading infrastructure executing hundreds of millions in trades. His background founding research-focused startups and contributing software to clinical and economic research teams gives him a rare mix of entrepreneurship, domain fluency, and reproducible-science practices. Based in San Francisco, he focuses on turning complex scientific problems into deployable, auditable pipelines and models that materially speed discovery.
9 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
BS Molecular Biology; BS Business Management (Strategy); Minor Economics, BS Molecular Biology; BS Business Management (Strategy); Minor Economics at Brigham Young UniversityHarvard UniversityBrigham Young University-IdahoDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Theoretical Chemistry, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Theoretical Chemistry at Stanford University
Spanish
Github Skills (143)
fastapi10
python10
json-schema10
swagger10
computational-chemistry10
security10
pip10
pydantic10
openapi10
python-development10
django10
async10
validation10
chemistry10
swagger-ui10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
atomsforhumanity/qcdata
Apr 2023 - Jul 2026
A package for structured Quantum Chemistry data.
Contributions:120 PRs, 327 pushes, 128 branches in 3 years 3 months
quantum-chemistry
coltonbh/qcinf
Mar 2025 - Jun 2026
Cheminformatics algorithms and structure utilities using standardized qcio data structures.
Contributions:1 review, 8 PRs, 49 pushes in 1 year 2 months
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