April 11, 2018: The Chemical Structure Association Trust (CSA Trust) is pleased to announce that it will present the triennial Mike Lynch Award to Dr. Rudy Potenzone. The purpose of the Award is to recognize and encourage outstanding accomplishments in education, research and development activities that are related to the systems and methods used to store, process and retrieve information about chemical structures, reactions and properties, and the award is named after Professor Mike Lynch, who was a pioneer in cheminformatics and the Honorary President of the Chemical Structure Association.
Rudy Potenzone is a seasoned veteran in molecular modeling, cheminformatics, and bioinformatics, and as well as being an expert practitioner of the art, he has led teams to deliver cutting-edge software products for researchers and scientists for over 25 years. He thus fully embodies the characteristics required of a recipient of the Mike Lynch Award.
Rudy’s career in informatics started at American Cyanamid, where he led a team to support 500 users of the Chemical Group Research Division. He moved to Polygen/Molecular Simulations (now part of BIOVIA) and managed a team that developed the QUANTA and CHARMm molecular modeling systems.
Rudy then moved to cheminformatics, chemical literature, and information retrieval, and as Director of the Research and New Product Development Department at Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) played a key role in planning and developing the SciFinder product which opened up the world of published chemical information and literature directly to chemists via its intuitive graphical user interface. After CAS, Rudy focused on systems to manage internally generated information, and at Molecular Design Ltd. (MDL – now part of BIOVIA) he oversaw the development of the Isentris system to replace ISIS, as well as Assay Explorer for managing screening information, and DiscoveryGate for unified access to published data. From MDL, he moved to LION Biosciences as CEO of US Operations, working on the strategic plan for the company’s innovative integrated information platform.
From LION, Rudy moved on to bioinformatics, and at Ingenuity Systems (now part of Qiagen), he developed the roadmap for a comprehensive, human-curated biological pathway knowledgebase and associated tools. Rudy then moved back to internal chemical information management at CambridgeSoft (now part of PerkinElmer) where he managed teams working on electronic lab notebooks, and eventually oversaw the full cheminformatics product portfolio of PerkinElmer Informatics. From PerkinElmer, Rudy moved to Microsoft and exploited his extensive customer and product experience to direct Microsoft’s efforts as worldwide industry strategist for the pharmaceutical industry, including products such as SQL Server, FAST, Office, Azure, HPC, and CRM.
Rudy is currently VP of Marketing for the TranSMART Foundation, which is an emerging global, open source, public/private partnership community that is developing a comprehensive, informatics-based analysis and data-sharing cloud platform for clinical and translational research.
Rudy’s career and contributions have spanned the whole gamut of informatics disciplines that impact the biopharma industry; and they have also kept pace with and anticipated the evolution of informatics tools from individual, chemistry-focused, point applications to today’s open source, cloud-based, bench-to-bedside informatics platforms.
The CSA Trust is pleased to recognize and honor Rudy’s substantial contributions to cheminformatics with the Mike Lynch Award, which will be presented at the 11th International Conference on Chemical Structures (http://www.int-conf-chem-structures.org/) to be held in the Netherlands in May 2018.
About the CSA Trust
The CSA Trust (www.csa-trust.org) is an internationally-recognized, registered charity which promotes education, research and development in the field of storage, processing and retrieval of information about chemical structures, reactions and compounds.
Contact
Phil McHale, CSA Trust Awards Committee
phil.mchale@comcast.net
Chemical Structure Association Trust 