The Warren L. DeLano Memorial Award for Computational Biosciences

On November 3rd, we lost Warren DeLano, Ph.D, brother, husband, son and scientist. 

Warren was a passionate biochemist whose life's work was to make open-source scientific software of the highest standards available to the bioscience community. PyMOL, his open-source molecular visualization system, is used by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and educational institutions worldwide. Significantly, PyMOL is not only a powerful three-dimensional visualization program, it is freely available to the general scientific community and it is considered one of the premier tools in its field. 

We, his family, acutely feel the loss of Warren. But the scientific community also lost someone who was committed to providing innovative and readily-accessible tools to further molecular research. We will never know the future innovations he might have introduced if Warren lived another 10, 20 or 30 more years. His passion and intelligence could have had an even greater impact on the biological sciences. 

With this in mind, we have established the Warren L. DeLano Memorial Fund to inspire others to follow Warren's passions: using open-source computer programming to advance bioscience. 

We intend to establish an annual award to recognize innovative developments in this field: The DeLano Award for Excellence in Computational Biosciences. This award would be given to a top computational bioscientist in recognition of their contributions to the field of computational biosciences. As Warren worked for the community as a whole, we will be keen to acknowledge those who make these contributions through Open Source as a service to the bioscience community.  

To make something like this happen in perpetuity would take about ~$100K to establish the endowment. We ask that you give a tax-deductible donation to this foundation and help promote excellence in this field. You can either send a check as instructed below or use PayPal.  Please help us commemorate his vision by donating to the Warren DeLano Memorial Fund.