Home > Meetings > #241 > Technical program highlights
Technical Program Highlights
ACS Chemical Information Division (CINF)
Spring, 2011 ACS National Meeting
Anaheim, CA (March 27-31)
Dr. Martin Walker has organized a very special symposium for this Spring Anaheim meeting in honor of his mentor, Dr. James Hendrickson, "Fifty Years of Computers in Organic Chemistry: A Symposium in Honor of James B. Hendrickson". Dr. Hendrikson, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Brandeis University, was a pioneer in the field of computer-aided organic synthesis design and was one of the early visionaries in this field. The designer of the programs SYNGEN and WebReactions, much current work in the field is built on the early work of his research group. Many of the successful students who trained with Dr. Hendrickson over his long career, or those whose work was built on ideas and concepts originating from Dr. Hendrickson's work, will be speaking in this symposium including Dr. Paul A. Wender, Bergstom Professor in Chemistry, Stanford University; Dr. Phil S. Baran, Professor, Scripps Research Institute; Dr. Valentina Eigner-Pitto, InfoChem GmbH and Dr. Orr Ravitz, SimBioSys Inc.
CINF was ahead of the Golden Globe awards this year when Dr. Steve Bachrach and Dr. Henry Rzepa planned our symposium "Internet and Chemistry: Social Networking". Use of the internet is pervasive and this symposium will focus on how it can be effectively used to promote the exchange of chemical ideas and chemical information. The symposium will feature presentations by Dr. Peter Murray-Rust on "Collaborative Agile Internet Projects: The Green Chain Reaction" and Dr. Antony Williams, the developer of the successful and highly useful ChemSpider, as well as presentations on the CAS Registry by Dr. Roger Schenck, "Publishing and Consuming Scientific Literature in a Digital, Device Agnostic World" by Dr. David Martinsen (ACS) and OpenTox by Dr. D.A. Gallagher.
Dr. X. Simon Wang, has organized a symposium on "Natural Products and Drug Discovery" which will feature some interesting talks on screening traditional Indonesian herbs by Dr. D. Barlow, and identifying antiviral leads from nature for common cold and flu treatment by Dr. J. M. Rollinger, as well as presentations on cheminformatic analysis of natural product data by Dr. Jose Medina-Franco’s group and data mining by Dr. Baker and Fourches with Dr. Alex Tropsha. Discoveries in the area of natural product cancer treatment will be presented by Dr. Lawrence Hurley, and natural product 5Ht-1A inhibitors will be discussed by Dr. X. Simon Wang. A discussion on patenting traditional medicines from natural products will be presented as well by Drs. Zabliski and Schenck.
Drs. Maciej Haranczyk and Jose Medina-Franco have organized "Integration of Combinatorial Chemistry with Cheminformatics: Current Trends and Future Directions in Drug Discovery and Material Science". This symposium features presentations by Dr. Dimitris Agrafiotis and Dr. W. Zheng on combinatorial library design and presentations on high throughput screening by Dr. Peter Shenkin. There will also be presentations on managing combinatorial libraries by Dr. Carsten Detering and fragment based design by Dr. Miereles. We are thankful to the CSA trust for cosponsoring, and Drs. Irina Sens and Peter Rusch for organizing “Open Data, Open Science, Open Knowledge” featuring presentations on visual search in scientific research data by Dr. Sens, curated scientific data resources by Dr. C.R. Groom and Open Data by Peter Murray-Rust.
Leah Solla, Robert. McFarland, N. Xiao have organized "Data Archiving, E-Science and Primary Data", which features presentations on Librarian 2.0 data management (Blanton-Kent), Pubchem (S. Swamidass),hosting a computing centric resource for chemistry data by Tony Williams and data curation profiles by Jeremy Garritano.
Dr. Guenther Grethe has selected and organized review of our student award posters for the CINF Scholarship for Scientific Excellence (sponsored by Accelrys) which will be presented in a poster session on Sunday evening March 27th.
We will also have some interesting presentations in our general papers session on Wednesday morning March 30th and a small CINF poster session as part of the Sci Mix session on late Monday evening.
The number of papers presented is too numerous to mention each by title and author so I only hoped to give you an overview flavor of the rich variety of topics and material. The Spring 2011 Anaheim meeting is the first which I have organized as CINF program chairperson. I want to thank Dr. Rajarshi Guha, past program chair, for all his advice and assistance. With the capable assistance of all the symposium chairpersons, I think we have put together an interesting program which will cover the diverse interests of the CINF memberships. Please come and experience first hand!
Rachelle Bienstock
Chair, Program Committee
