What's Going On?

I’ve been asked a lot by mail recently ‘What’s Going On?’ Well, here is are some facts and some emotion.

So today is my last day at work here at EMBL-EBI. It’s been a fun and thrilling ride (for me at least), I’ve made lots of new friends, living life as an Open Data advocate and academic researcher, and most importantly having the privilege to lead the team here responsible for the ChEMBL database. It had been a long-term goal of mine to unlock large-scale bioactivity data from proprietary data silos and eye-wateringly expensive paywalls; so as US President George Bush famously said ‘Mission Accomplished!’. The impact of ChEMBL on academia, SMEs and large pharma has been great - and you can see the impact in new method development, but more importantly in potential new future drugs. My personal indebtedness to the Wellcome Trust for their support is immeasurable. An additional big shout out to Digital Science for their vision in donating the SureChEMBL platform to us.

I’ll be starting a new blog, covering my next adventure - artificial intelligence-enhanced drug discovery. I’ll tweet when this is up and running, but the first few weeks at a new job, as I’m sure you know, is spent sorting out pencils, working out where the best coffee is hidden and most importantly navigating the office politics of the milk in the fridge. When this blog starts up, I’ll tweet the url. For those of you interested in the ChEMBL groups activities, make sure you follow @ChEMBL and @SureChEMBL. If you want to see what I'm up to next, it's at @StratMed.

If any of you are ever in the West End of London (which to non-native Londoners actually means the centre) get in touch with me, and I’ll try to treat you to an orange mocha frappuccino.

Now for the bit you all actually care about….

Anne Hersey is taking over the ChEMBL Wellcome Trust Strategic Award grant for ChEMBL (which also covers SureChEMBL). Many of you will know Anne already, and know just what good news this is. Anne is also taking over the majority of our other grants and activities of the group, including our participation in IMI eTox, NIH IDG KMC, & GSK CTTV grants.
Jo McEntyre will be PI for EMBL-EBI on the IMI OpenPHACTS grant, although the majority of the work will be done by ChEMBL group staff. If you don’t know about the Open PHACTS platform, check out what they have done!
Ugis Sarkans will become PI for EMBL-EBI on the FP7 HeCaTos grant. The data content and modelling components will be done by ChEMBL group staff.

If you have general questions about ChEMBL or SureChEMBL first try the support email addresses chembl-help@ebi.ac.uk and surechembl-help@ebi.ac.uk.

Comments

Vladimir Chupakhin said…

you already the legend, how far you can get )

17 May 2015 at 18:37

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