KENNETH C. LEWIS, Ph.D.
CEO, OpAns LLC

Ken Lewis co-founded OpAns, a contract analytical services and software company serving the pre-clinical therapeutic drug discovery market, in 2004 with Joe Simpkins. As CEO, Dr. Lewis leads the management of laboratory operations providing LC-DAD-ELSD-CLND-MS, logD, solubility, chemical and microsomal stability, metabolite ID, in-vivo quantification and sales.

Dr. Lewis’ extensive background optimizing analytical chemistry for drug discovery  prepared him to launch OpAns . He served in research scientist/investigator roles, as well as research advisor, for GlaxoWellcome and Lilly Research Labs, both in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. His leadership, management and vision led to the creation of new software and lab processes.

As research advisor at Lilly, Dr. Lewis integrated analytical chemistry into lead generation by supporting chemistry, biology, compound handling, and screening. His leadership and vision lead to a three-fold growth in staff, while leveraging productivity gains to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of lead generation.

He has led software development projects for the automatic reduction of analytical data and for interpreting, posting and retrieving analytical data.

Dr. Lewis was a post-doctoral fellow at Affymax Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. He earned a bachelor’s of science degree from Mercer University in Georgia and his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

JOSEPH D. SIMPKINS
Vice President, Software
OpAns LLC

Joseph Simpkins co-founded OpAns, a contract analytical services and software company serving the pre-clinical therapeutic drug discovery market, in 2004 with Ken Lewis. As vice president for software, Simpkins oversees the management and development of OpAns software products. Specifically, Simpkins is responsible for the development of the analytical chemistry processing and workflow application toolset, OpAns Analytical Studio, a vendor-neutral LC-MS data processing, publishing and reporting tool. Simpkins was responsible for the delivery and integration of the core processing algorithms for noise reduction, peak picking, baseline estimation and compound determination as well as the plug-in architecture of OpAns Analytical Studio.

Simpkins’s background, with nearly 20 years’ industry experience, includes informatics consultancy, management and engineering at Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline Inc., Duke University, and Quantum Research Services.  His experience includes designing and building large scale software systems including fermentation control, biological inventory and desktop grid-computing.

While at Lilly Research labs in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Simpkins designed and developed an automated high-throughput vendor-neutral system for retrieving, archiving, processing, and publishing LC-MS data to support drug discovery.

While at GlaxoSmithKline, Simpkins designed and built the first large-scale desktop grid-computing system for supporting a variety of cheminformatics and computational chemistry algorithms using a common framework.

Simpkins earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Mississippi State University and a MS in Aerospace Engineering, with a mathematics minor, from North Carolina State University.