On Tuesday, Nov 3, 2009 Warren DeLano passed away suddenly at his home. He was 37 years old.
Warren is the developer of PyMol, an Open Source molecular visualization system that has made enormous contributions to the community and can produce stunning visualizations of Proteins. His impact on the field of protein visualization has been recognized many times by the community and his tools are used in labs all over the world.
Warren DeLano was born in Philadelphia, raised in Palo Alto, and educated at Yale University. At Yale, he joined Axel Brunger's lab, where he made critical contributions to the computational tools and methods that made "CNS" a universal computational crystallography program.
After Yale, Warren received his doctorate at the University of California, San Francisco under the mentorship of Jim Wells, PhD. He then became a founding scientist at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, creator of PYMOL, and founder of DeLano Scientific.
Throughout his life and career, Warren made fundamental and highly valued contributions to science. His Open Source PyMOL software is widely used throughout the world, and nearly all publications that display macromolecular structures use PyMOL. He was a strong advocate of freely available software and the Open Source movement. He also encouraged all who came into his lab or office. His sunny, optimistic outlook endeared him to all he knew; his brilliance awed and inspired many throughout the scientific and software worlds.
He is survived by his wife Beth Pehrson, mother Margaret DeLano, father James DeLano, Jr., step-mother Cathy Groves DeLano, step-father Tom Snouse, sister Jennifer DeLano and brother Brendan DeLano, as well as three aunts and eight cousins. A memorial will be held in several weeks – we will update this site as soon as information is available.
