About

Bio

Mats (Totte) Karlsson, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in Physical Chemistry (NMR spectroscopy) from Stockholm University, Sweden. His supervisor was Prof. Malcolm Levitt. He completed a 3 year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington with Prof. Gary Drobny.

Since founding Dune Scientific, LLC in 2007, he has spent over almost 30 years building software for the scientific community — user interfaces, algorithms, data bases and distributed computing solutions.

Most recently, he was a Senior Software Engineer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science (2016–2024), where he built Arboreta, a 3D neuron-tracing application, along with automated lab systems including software for daily video capturing sessions of mice. He created backend and front end software to control and program a six axis precision robot employed in the automatic collection of arrays of ultra thin (70 nm) brain tissue slices.

Earlier, at the University of Washington’s RoadRunner project (2011–2014), he translated tens of thousands of lines of code in the libRoadRunner systems-biology engine from C# to C++ and built cross-language wrapper APIs, as well as a, from the ground up, language agnostic plugin system.

Alongside client work, Totte has spent nearly two decades building Moleculix, a C++ molecular visualization and modeling library, and Moleculix Junior, a desktop application that brings simple tools for building and learn about molecules to students and educators. Moleculix has its own website: www.moleculix.com

Today, Dune Scientific combines that scientific-software background with modern, AI-assisted development practices — using Claude, Codex, and Deepseek to build faster without sacrificing engineering discipline.