My name is Dr. Michael Böhme, I am a theoretical chemist and an independent software developer based in Thuringia, Germany.
I spent 12 years as an active researcher at the Institute of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. My scientific work spanned computational chemistry, inorganic chemistry, coordination chemistry, and magnetochemistry, resulting in over 34 peer-reviewed scientific publications.
Having co-authored dozens of papers, I know the daily reality of research first-hand: you spend weeks synthesizing compounds, solving crystal structures, or running quantum-chemical calculations, only to hit a wall when it is time to prepare figures for a manuscript, poster, or grant application.
From Frustration with Scientific Software to shapeXT
Programming has been my passion alongside chemistry for decades. Over the years, I watched video games evolve to render photorealistic, highly detailed 3D worlds at high frame rates, while molecular visualization in chemistry remained largely stuck in the 1990s. How come?
The tools many of us rely on a daily scale were designed decades ago. Some are still tied to legacy 32-bit architectures, rely on deprecated OpenGL implementations, struggle to render large framework structures without lag, and offer little to no integration with theoretical chemistry. From my personal experience, preparing figures for scientific publications often meant switching between different programs and spending a long time polishing them in external graphics editors.
After finishing my PhD in 2019, I started prototyping and building shapeXT to tackle exactly these issues.