Bios

David Wild

I am CoPI of the Cheminformatics OLCC project, and an Associate Professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, where I run the Cheminformatics and Chemogenomics Research Group (CCRG).  Since 2004, I have been running a graduate cheminformatics program there, offering Ph.D., M.S. degrees and certificates in Cheminformatics, with an emphasis on distance education. I have previously run graduate classes in cheminformatics using a variety of remote technologies, including videoconferencing, web conferencing, wikis and the CIC Courseshare program. Most recently, I created the Indiana Cheminformatics Education Portal of free cheminformatics learning materials, along with an associated low cost Introducing Cheminformatics eBook. I also run a Cheminformatics Education Google+ Group for discussion of cheminformatics education resources and opportunities.

Robert E. Belford

  I am a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a focus on the use of computers in Chemical Education.  I am interested in how digital ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) are changing the way our society shares and communicates information, and the impact this is having on chemical education and the practice of science.  I currently serve as Chair of the ACS Division of Chemical Education's (CHED) Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE), and see the Cheminformatics OLCC as an opportunity for the CCCE to contribute to the advancement of science by providing a mechanism for the integration of these new and evolving technologies into the chemistry curriculum.

Abhik Seal

I am a PHD (Chemical Informatics ) student at Indiana University Bloomington working with Prof David Wild  at the chemgenomics and cheminformatics lab .Before joining here I was a Banker at State Bank of India.

Sunghwan Kim

Sunghwan Kim is a Staff Scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH).  As a computational chemist and cheminformatician, he is actively involved in the PubChem project, which develops and maintains a small-molecule database called PubChem.  Specifically, his research has been focused on building and improving “PubChem3D”, which is PubChem’s chemical information resource derived from 3-dimensional (3-D) molecular structures.  He holds a M.Sc. in Inorganic Chemistry (from Hanyang University, South Korea) and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry (from the University of Georgia at Athens).

Steve Heller

I have been involved in chemical databases and chemical information since the early 1970's. From the NIH/EPA/NIST mass spectral database to the NIH/EPA Chemical Information System (CIS) to the Open Source IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) I have seen the explosion of electronic information.  This vast explosion of electronic information, coupled with the Internet has created the opportunity to connect these many, many silos and islands of data and information. Since what we are looking to access, analyze and understand is associated with  a chemical, the ability of the InChI chemical identifier linking these sources is critical to progress. I am currently the Project Director of the InChI Trust, a non-profit UK charity that is responsible for the support and expansion of the Open Source InChI algorithm.  Leaning the skills to find information and data is critical to all those students in chemistry. That is why I am so enthusiastic about being involved in this online intercollegiate course in Cheminformatics/Chemical Information Sciences.

Nathan Brown

Nathan BrownNathan Brown is the Head of the in silico Medicinal Chemistry group in the Cancer Therapeutics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research in London (UK). At the ICR, Nathan and his group support our entire drug discovery portfolio together with developing new computational methodologies to enhance our drug design work. Nathan conducted his doctoral research in Sheffield with Professor Peter Willett focusing on evolutionary algorithms and graph theory. After a two–year Marie Curie fellowship in Amsterdam in collaboration with Professor Johann Gasteiger in Erlangen, he joined the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel for a three–year Presidential fellowship in Basel working with Professors Peter Willett and Karl–Heinz Altmann. Nathan's work has led to the pioneering work on mulitobjective de novo design in addition to a variety of discoveries and method development in bioisosteric identification and replacement, scaffold hopping, molecular descriptors and statistical modelling. Nathan continues to pursue his research in all aspects of in silico medicinal chemistry. Nathan recent published the first book on bioisosteres, entitled Bioisosteres in Medicinal Chemistry.

Stuart Chalk

I am an Associate Professor Chemistry trained as an analytical chemist with expertise in flow analysis methodology and instrumentation.  Over the last 15 years I have morphed into a cheminformatician working on research projects to develop data standards (e.g. the Analytical Information Markup Language - AnIML, Common Standard for eXchange – CSX, Experiment Markup Language - ExptML), electronic laboratory notebooks (e.g. the Eureka Research Workbench), scientific ontologies (e.g. the Chemical Analysis Ontology – CAO), and scientific data representation.  My current projects include: REST API development for NIST-IUPAC solubility datasets, chemical property data extraction and annotation from PDF files, scientific data framework (SciDF) development, and the Chemical Analysis Metadata Platform (ChAMP).  I have expertise in XML and Markup Languages, XSLT/XPATH/SVG, RDF, JSON/JSON-LD, PHP, Javascript, MySQL, SPARQL, CSS, CMS’s, REST interfaces, API design and construction, schema design, ontology development and Fedora-Commons.

Ralph Stuart

Ralph has been the Chemical Hygiene Officer at Keene State College in Keene, NH since 2014. He graduated from Cornell University in 1979 and got his master's at the University of Vermont in 1989. He managed lab safety at UVM for 25 years and was the Chemical Hygiene Officer at Cornell for 3 years before moving to Keene State.

Alex M. Clark

Founder of Molecular Materials Informatics, which is dedicated to bringing cheminformatics to modern computing platforms (mobile, web, cloud, etc.). Outspoken advocate for increased awareness of chemical information technology by experimental chemists, in order to make the results of their experiments usable by machine learning algorithms, as well as other expert humans. Card-carrying former experimental chemist, software engineer from a young age, with many years spent creating software for computer-aided drug design. For more information, see LinkedIn Profile and Cheminformatics 2.0 blog.

Xavier Prat-Resina

I am an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at The University of Minnesota Rochester's “Center for Learning Innovation”. I am interested in figuring out in what ways technology can help learning and it what ways it hinders it. I have authored several web platforms that make use of graphical interfaces to learn chemistry. Models 360 is a collection of several hundreds of molecules, where properties such as structural symmetry, vibrations and electrostatic maps can be displayed with the Jmol applet. More recently, I developed ChemEd X Data as a graphical tool to help students navigate through large amounts of chemical and physical data and build their own knowledge by figuring out on their own trends and exceptions. I am also interested in assessing how much learning or how different the learning is when we move from a face-to-face classroom environment to an interconnected computer environment. This is why I am thrilled to be part of the OLCC project and learning in what ways the new communication technologies can overcome the current barriers of our educational system.