Anthony Nicholls

Anthony (Ant) Nicholls is a physicist and entrepreneur from Plympton, Plymouth, England. He was also Chair of the Worldwide Protein Data Bank. 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.

Business Work conducted on DelPhi and GRASP continues to be the intellectual property of Columbia University. As a result, Nicholls consulted with David Weininger, and decided in 1997 to found OpenEye Scientific Software in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Nicholls has been termed the "Steve Jobs of the Info Mesa" regarding his work at OpenEye. OpenEye has employed several notable people in cheminformatics, including RasMol developer Roger Sayle. OpenEye was acquired by Cadence Design Systems in September 2022. In early 2025, Nicholls announced his retirement from OpenEye.

Nicholls was also Chair of the Worldwide Protein Data Bank.