Discussion

OLCC S04 | Tue, 01/31/2017 - 12:49

Hey

Hello, my name is Casey. I am majoring in chemistry and minoring in biology at South Dakota State University. I am a senior this year and am hoping to graduate this spring. The reason I chose to take this course is because I want to improve my knowledge of computer usages in the field of chemistry.

OLCC S01 | Tue, 01/31/2017 - 12:48

I am Brian, a senior biochemistry student at South Dakota State University. I will be graduating this May. My future plans are to attend graduate school and obtain a Ph.D. in biochemistry. I am taking this course as I wanted to explore cheminformatics as it is becoming an increasing valuable and needed skill.

Cody Ward | Tue, 01/31/2017 - 10:59

Hey,

My name is Cody Ward, and I am a student at South Dakota State University. I am majoring in biology and biochemistry, and I will be graduating this spring (hopefully). I decided to take this course because I understand that computers are being used more and more everyday in most areas of chemistry, and I thought that it would be to my advantage to learn of some of the applications for cheminformatics before I finish my undergrad studies.

Robert Belford's picture
Robert Belford | Tue, 01/31/2017 - 10:17

Greetings students and fellow faculty,

I know you have all been getting emails from me, and so thought I'd take a minute to introduce myself. I am an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, I have run the ACS Division of Chemical Education Committee on Computers in Chemical Education ConfChem Website for the past decade. With Jon Holmes of UW-Madison I am responsible for this course website, which I think should be viewed as an interactive electronic textbook, that is being discussed and shared by multiple campuses, and where the students even get to ask the authors questions! So please feel free to contact me directly if you have any problems with the website, rebelford@ualr.edu.

This is actually the third OLCC that I have been involved with, as I was part of the 2004 OLCC on Chemical Hygiene and the 2015 OLCC on Cheminformatics. My PhD is in physical chemistry and I have no formal training in cheminformatics, a term that I do not believe was even "coined" when I was a graduate student. But I do see in this age of pervasive digital technologies how cheminformatics and eScience are on the cutting edge of scientific discovery, and I am excited to have an opportunity to be part of this course and learn more.

I should also mention that I am excited to be part of a course that involves students and faculty from multiple campuses, and I hope my students at UALR will get to interact with and collaboratively learn with students from other campuses.

I would like to finally comment that the authors of the papers have spent a lot of time and effort developing this material, and it is here for you, the students. So please make comments, ask questions, and interact with the authors and other experts who are involved with this class. I know that at least for my students at UALR, this is a great chance to learn from experts, many of whom we would never have had a chance to interact with if it was not for this class. So do participate with the online communications!
Sincerely,
Bob Belford, Ph.D.

Anja Brunner | Tue, 01/31/2017 - 04:18

Hello everyone!
Damon Ridley and I work for the Reaxys team at Elsevier. Bob kindly invited us to participate in the OLCC about a month ago so, like many of you, we are new at this and learning as we go along. In our case, though, this learning involves working out ways to help you!

Damon is a chemist with decades of experience in teaching and as a consultant to industry. He became interested in chemical information retrieval as a young academic at the University of Sydney (Organic Chemistry Department) in 1983 because he "could see electronic information retrieval was the way for the future, and could also see the intellectual challenges." In addition to his academic work at the University, Damon was a consultant with the Chemical Abstracts Service for almost 30 years. His work with CAS started in 1984 with CAS Online, then with the STN Network (command line-driven information retrieval) and finally with SciFinder. Damon is author of 4 books and over 50 publications on chemical information retrieval, and has given well over 1,000 workshops and lectures on the topic worldwide. Now he consults for Reaxys.

I had a somewhat unorthodox entry into the world of chemical information. Trained as a biologist, I taught lower and upper division biology courses at community colleges and small universities for 7 years before transitioning into industry for marketing and innovation management. My work as a science writer and content strategist brought me to Reaxys at Elsevier. For the last 3 years, I have supported their efforts to explore ways in which Reaxys can contribute to and enhance learning experiences in the chemistry classroom and lab. And therein lies my interest: finding ways to make scientific information accessible to everyone, not only as a technological solution but also as an intellectual skill fomented by education at any age and in any discipline.

Damon and I are based in Germany (although Damon gets to go "home" to Sydney for 4 months each year). Please understand that with the difference in time zones, we cannot promise immediate replies to your comments and questions. But we will try to stay on top of things as much as possible.

We are looking forward to this course!
Cheers,
Anja and Damon

Tanya Gupta | Mon, 01/30/2017 - 14:53

Hello All,

We are a bit behind but excited to join you all for Cheminformatics. Damon, I am sure my students will have good number of questions and inputs for Reaxys.

Sunghwan Kim | Mon, 01/30/2017 - 14:00

Dear all,

I am Sunghwan Kim, a Staff Scientist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. I have been working in the PubChem project since I joined the team back in 2007. As an OLCC faculty member, I am responsible for writing some reading materials and developing class activities (primarily for the second half of this OLCC course), but I'm more than happy to help you learn cheminformatics from this course.

By the way, PubChem has a blog and social media accounts to keep our users updated, so please follow us for the most recent developments in PubChem.

PubChem Blog (https://pubchemblog.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/)
Google+ (https://plus.google.com/115030503755312217027)
FaceBook (https://www.facebook.com/pubchem)
Twitter (https://twitter.com/pubchem)

Usually, there will be no more than one post per month, so it will not going to bother you much. The most recent post is about molecular weights, which is much harder to calculate than some people may think.

https://pubchemblog.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2016/11/29/atomic-mass-changes-in-pubchem/

I hope you enjoy this post (and the OLCC, too). Thank you and have a good day.

Best,

Sunghwan,

Robert Belford's picture
Robert Belford | Sun, 01/29/2017 - 10:26

The link to this page is in the website tutorials link of the course homepage (Spring 2017 Course)

OLCC S19 | Sat, 01/28/2017 - 16:31

Idid not receive the email concerning joining hypothesis as it was sent to an outside account. Tried unsuccessfully to find the link for hypothesis within OLCC site. Only link available to this module within the OLCC site is through the email sent to my off campus email.

Damon Ridley's picture
Damon Ridley | Sat, 01/28/2017 - 03:46

Michael

Thanks for your comments. Reaxys is indeed an impressive tool, but (like with so many information retrieval products) we need to understand a little about how it works. We are writing additional teaching materials (with practice problems) and I hope you look at them also. Don't hesitate to let me know if there are any special topics for which you would like me to prepare materials.

Damon