2027 Skolnik Winner

The American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Information (CINF) is pleased to announce that Dr. Alexander Tropsha has been selected to receive the 2027 Herman Skolnik Award in recognition of his 30+ years of research into curating chemical information appropriately and analyzing it in such a way that the results obtained are probably reliable.

After receiving his Master’s degree from Moscow State University, Dr. Tropsha went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy Degree in biochemistry and pharmacology there as well. He began focusing on molecular modelling while doing postdoctoral work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill NC and was subsequently appointed to the faculty there. He is now K.H. Lee Distinguished Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling in the Eshelman School of Pharmacy as well as Chief Domain Scientist for Molecular Informatics at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI).

Alex has trained over 80 graduate and post-doctoral students in his years at UNC. With them and other colleagues, he has published extensively on quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis in general and on best practices in particular. His many widely referenced articles on the topic include “Beware of q2!” in the J Molecular Graphics and Modeling (2002); “Trust, but verify” in J Chemical Information and Modeling (JCIM; 2010); “Best practices for QSAR model development, validation, and exploitation” in Molecular Informatics (2010); “Curation of chemogenomics data” in Nature Chem. Biol. (2015); “QSAR without borders” in Chem Soc Rev. (2020) and “One size does not fit all” in J Cheminformatics (2025). The group has also built databases, software tools, and publicly accessible web portals like Chembench, STopTox, ROBOKOP, and MeDIC that support automating cheminformatic data curation; building and mining biomedical knowledge graphs; model building; and virtual screening,

Over and above those research activities, he has served the community as an Associate Editor of both JCIM and J Computer-Aided Molecular Design (JCAMD). He also serves on the Editorial Boards of several other cheminformatics journals.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Tropsha on being named the Herman Skolnik Award recipient for 2027. The attendant honorarium and commemorative plaque will be presented as part of a Symposium to be organized in his honor for the National ACS Meeting next fall.

Robert D. Clark
Chair, ACS CINF Awards Committee

2 October 2026