William Andrew Goddard III

William A. Goddard III was born in El Centro California and lived his early years in farm towns across California (El Centro, Delano, Indio, Lodi, Oildale, MacFarland, Firebaugh, also Yuma AZ), where his dad made the wooden boxes used to ship agricultural products. He always dreamed of living in Los Angeles. Goddard earned a BS in engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1960 and PhD in engineering science with a minor in physics from Caltech in 1964.

He has four children (Bill, Suzy, Cecilia, Lisa) and has been married for 58 years.

He joined the chemistry faculty at Caltech in November 1964 where he remains today as a professor and researcher.

After his Ph.D. he remained at the California Institute of Technology as Arthur Amos Noyes Research Fellow (1964–66), Professor of Theoretical Chemistry (1967–78) and Professor of Chemistry & Applied Physics (1978-).

Goddard has made many contributions to theoretical chemistry, such as the generalized valence bond (GVB) method for ab initio electronic structure calculations and the ReaxFF force field for classical molecular dynamics simulations. Goddard's consulting for industrial laboratories on practical problems — engine wear inhibitors, and corrosion, scale, and wax inhibitors in oil pipelines — led him to co-found several companies applying his group's simulation methods commercially. In 1984 he co-founded Molecular Simulations Inc. (later Accelrys, now part of BIOVIA) together with his graduate student Stephen L. Mayo, chairing its board from 1984 to 1991 and remaining a director until 1995. In 1990 he co-founded Schrödinger with Columbia chemist Richard Friesner, serving on its board of directors until 2000. He also co-founded Materials Research Source LLC, reorganized as Systine Inc. in 2003, and the bioinformatics company BionomiX Inc.

Goddard's later ventures moved toward biotechnology. In November 2005 he co-founded the Seattle-based company Allozyne with Caltech colleague David A. Tirrell and postdoctoral researcher Deepshikha Datta, commercializing a Caltech method for substituting non-natural amino acids into protein therapeutics to allow site-specific PEGylation; the company was launched out of the Accelerator Corporation incubator and raised a $30 million Series B in 2008. In 2008 Accelerator backed a second company out of his laboratory, GPC-Rx, based on computational selection of drug candidates with improved target specificity.

He is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

In August 2007, the American Chemical Society at its biannual national convention celebrated Goddard's 70th birthday with a 5-day symposium titled, "Bold predictions in theoretical chemistry."

As of November 2017, Goddard has published 1160 peer-reviewed articles.