Paul-Jean (PJ) Letourneau

PJ became fascinated with computation when he was in high school in the mid-'90s when he started programming his graphing calculator to solve calculus problems. He got a physics degree at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2003, and then did a Masters in Computational Physics at the University of Calgary. Throughout his degrees, he worked at the NANUC NMR laboratory at the University of Alberta as a visiting scientist, where he created and published the PJNMR (Pure Java NMR) simulation software for translating quantum density matrix transforms into NMR pulse sequences. After his masters work, PJ moved to the US and joined Wolfram Research, where he built the genomic analysis features in the Wolfram|Alpha search engine, which required solving lots of BigData and distributed computing problems. Realizing that these computing challenges were literally everywhere on the internet, PJ moved to New York in 2014 to attend the Recurse Center programmer retreat, and then went on to work on product and infrastructure engineering at Etsy. PJ moved back to Vancouver Canada with his wife and son in 2018, where he worked for startups like Jane App and LOOM doing full-stack data and product engineering. His role at Synex dovetails his NMR background with his engineering work in a very satisfying way!