Richard Gowers from NextMove Software speaking at CCK-17

In addition to Wendy Warr and André Frade, we are pleased to announce Richard Gowers from NextMove Software will also be speaking at CCK-17:

Element Parsing Served Five Ways

Richard’s talk will explore different levels of optimising a seemingly simple task. Along the way, various algorithms used in chemical similarity, bioinformatics and text mining will be discussed.

Richard is a Senior Software Engineer at NextMove Software, which develops cheminformatics solutions deployed globally at 9 of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies. He is also the lead developer of MDAnalysis, a Python toolkit for… MD analysis, fancy that.

Congratulations to Dr Wendy Warr

2020 Herman Skolnik Award winner announced…

Dr. Wendy Warr will be the recipient of the 2020 Herman Skolnik Award presented by the ACS Division of Chemical Information, for her contributions to the fields of chemical information and a number of related fields that impinge on chemical information including chemical structure representation, substructure searching, retrosynthesis and reaction prediction.

The prize consists of a $3,000 honorarium and a plaque. Dr. Warr will also be invited to organize an award symposium at the Fall 2020 ACS National Meeting to be held in San Francisco.

For more than 40 years, Dr. Warr has had a global influence on chemical information and cheminformatics. She provides services to the chemical information, cheminformatics and computational chemistry communities worldwide, and has evolved into a key opinion leader and trend watcher. These trends have included: combinatorial chemistry, chemistry and the Internet, and intranet and ethernet in industry (these three in the early 1990s), outsourcing, changing pharma R&D strategies (these two in the early 2000s), and continue to today’s AI, cloud computing, and blockchain. 

She formed her current employment, Wendy Warr & Associates, in 1992. Since that time she has been successfully supplying business and competitive intelligence services to a broad spectrum of clients across the world. Her success stems from her extensive network, incredible energy, and deep curiosity, and her specialized market knowledge of chemical information, computational chemistry, drug discovery, cheminformatics, STM publishing, and scientific communication. Her clients have included at least 15 major pharmaceutical and chemical companies, venture capitalists, financial analysts, all of the well-known chemistry publishers, software companies, and many cheminformatics and analytical chemistry companies, as well as many smaller commercial and not-for-profit or academic organizations. Scientific database producers have benefited from her expert counsel and services in recent years.

Dr. Warr obtained her doctoral degree (D. Phil.) from the University of Oxford in 1971, and subsequently joined ICI Pharmaceuticals where she held multiple positions culminating in leading the department of Information Services. In 1992, Dr. Warr established her own company, Wendy Warr & Associates, that provides business and competitive intelligence services to a broad spectrum of clients in the United States, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and Asia.

She has played key roles in several professional organizations including the American Chemical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, German Chemical Society, Society of Chemical Industry, Chemical Structure Association Trust  and the Institute of Information Scientists, and in many cases has been instrumental in shaping their activities. 

She has published over 80 articles in academic journals and over 100 commercial reports, along with numerous invited lectures at venues such as NIST, Washington DC and University of Strasbourg, France. She has been an Associate Editor for the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (as well as its predecessor, the Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences).  She has received numerous awards and honors including the Ernie Hyde Award of the Chemical Structure Association (1984), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

Raajarshi Guha
Chair, CINF Awards Committee

Congratulations, Wendy! We are looking forward to hosting you in Oxford for CCK-17.