Anthony (Ant) Nicholls is a physicist and entrepreneur from Plympton, Plymouth, England. He was also Chair of the Worldwide Protein Data Bank.
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Education
Nicholls was educated at Plympton Grammar School and then from 1979–1982 studied Physics at the University of Oxford before joining the Institute for Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University. There he studied quantum dispersion of excitations in biological systems with William Rhodes, and in football with coach Bobby Bowden. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in biophysics in 1988 and began as a postdoctoral researcher (postdoc) with Barry Honig at Columbia University, New York City.
Software development
Nicholls has worked mainly in molecular biophysics, designing software that is used in drug discovery uses.
While at Columbia University, he re-wrote the electrostatics program named DelPhi. DelPhi took input from a coordinate file format of a molecule and calculated the electrostatic potential in and around the system, using a finite difference solution to the Poisson–Boltzmann equation.
Nicholls later wrote the graphics software Graphical Representation and Analysis of Structural Properties (GRASP). GRASP is a graphics program written for Silicon Graphics computers that was used by the structural biology community to visualize macromolecules. It was the most widely used software for computing and displaying polyhedral molecular surfaces during the 1990s.