Author: gracebaysinger

Elgelbert Zass

This news article was reprinted using content and images from 2012 issues of the CSA Trust Newsletter (Issue 19, page 1, 12-17).

Dr. Engelbert Zass is head of the Chemistry Biology Pharmacy Information Center of ETH Zurich. An organic chemist by training, he specialized in chemical information after receiving his Ph.D. in 1977, and collected more than 30 years experience in searching, operating and designing chemistry databases, as well as in support, training and education of users of chemical information. He has given numerous lectures and courses in Europe and the U.S., is author of more than 60 papers on chemical information and served on several advisory boards. From 1999 till 2004, he was partner in the BMBF Project “Vernetztes Studium – Chemie”, where he was engaged in the design of multimedia educational material for chemical information. Present activities include organization of information services and user support as well as teaching chemical information courses at ETH Zurich and the University of Berne. He has been selected to receive in 2011 the CSA Trust Mike Lynch Award for his lifetime work in education, research and development activities that facilitate the storage, processing and retrieval of chemical information.

Read “Corner of a magic triangle,” Martin Brändle’s interview of Engelbert Zass after Bert received the Mike Lynch Award (CSA Trust Newsletter, Issue 19, page 12-17).

Sandy Lawson received the Mike Lynch award at the Noordwijkerhout meeting in June, 2008.

This news article was reprinted using content and images from 2008 issues of the CSA Trust Newsletter (Issue 17, page 2, and Issue 18, page 1).

Professor Dr Alexander (Sandy) Lawson graduated from St Andrews University, Scotland, in 1966 with a first class honours degree in Chemistry. He went on to study at Imperial College, London, where he was awarded a PhD and DIC in 1970. He held a number of positions including research fellowships at the Universities of Kent and Mainz, directorships at the Beilstein Institute from 1982 to 1994, and subsequently directorships at MDL. He is currently Director of Research and Development at Elsevier Information Systems GmbH. Sandy has made major contributions to the fields of chemical information handling and chemical structure representation, in particular in the development of the Beilstein database and software (including the famous Lawson Number for indexing chemical structures).

Read Sandy’s article “Chemical Structure Databases: at the Crossroads of Description and Design” that was published in the CSA Trust Newsletter, Issue 17, page 3.

Johann Gasteiger

This news article was reprinted using content and images from 2005 issues of the CSA Trust Newsletter (Issue 9, page 2, and Issue 10, page 1, 4). His picture shown above is from Wikipedia.

Professor Dr Johann Gasteiger will be honoured with the 2005 CSA Trust Mike Lynch Award. The CSA Trust acknowledges Professor Gasteiger’s outstanding accomplishments in the field of computational chemistry and structure elucidation. The award will be presented at the 7th International Conference on Chemical Structures in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, in June 2005.

Professor Dr Gasteiger was born in 1941 in southern Germany and studied chemistry at the universities of Munich and Zurich.  In 1971, he achieved his PhD. After a postdoc stay at University of California, Berkeley in 1971/72, he returned to Munich where he became Professor in 1988. At the University of Erlangen–Nürnberg he founded the ‘Computer-Chemie-Centrum in 1994.  Professor Gasteiger is a member of the ACS, CSA Trust, MGMS, the German Chemical Society and of several editorial boards.

The keynote address on the Sunday evening was given by Johnny Gasteiger, who was presented with the 2005 CSA Trust Mike Lynch award by Guenter Grethe. The title of Johnny’s talk was ‘My Love Affair with Molecules – and Reactions’. Although the international language of chemistry is the two-dimensional structure diagram, Johnny com- pares molecules to human beings, and he treasures the fact that they are three-dimensional species which have skin, left and right hands and can change shape. The keynote address covered computational approaches to the generation of 3D molecular models, the calculation of molecular surface properties, the generation of multiple conformations and the identification of molecular chirality. The address concluded with a description of some of the computer methods for modelling chemical reactions. The full talk given by Johnny Gasteiger is at http://www2.chemie.uni-erlangen.de/presentations/. Following the keynote address, delegates were treated to a reception, courtesy of Elsevier MDL and a splendid rijsttafel sponsored by CAS.