Colton is the founder of Atoms for Humanity, working with co-resident Jan Estrada Pabón to build open infrastructure for scalable computational chemistry and ultimately enable cleaner energy, biocompatible materials, better medicines, and the wholesale replacement of the toxic industrial chemistry of modern life. At Astera, he plans to develop technologies for high-throughput molecular simulation and apply them to frontier research in sustainability, including automated reaction-network discovery, rational catalyst design, and biodegradable polymer synthesis. Colton holds a PhD in theoretical chemistry from Stanford. He previously worked in Silicon Valley as a chemist and software engineer, designing high-throughput DNA/RNA synthesis pipelines, distributed computing systems, and large-scale cloud infrastructure.