Mike Lynch Award 2002: Peter Willett

Willett was born in 1953 and earned his M.A. in Natural Sciences (Chemistry) at the University of Oxford in 1975. He earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in information studies at the University of Sheffield in 1976 and 1979, respectively. His Ph.D. work focused on the indexing of chemical reactions and post-doctoral work focused on the automatic classification of document databases. After serving as a lecturer and reader, Willett became a professor in 1991 and was awarded a D.Sc. in 1997. He spent his entire professional career at Sheffield, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2019. 

His research focused on the development of novel techniques and algorithms that became incorporated broadly in cheminformatics databases and software. Among Willett’s many contributions were developing methods for chemical reaction indexing and searching, for indexing three-dimensional molecular structures, and for comparing macromolecular structures. Willett is known for his strategies for similarity searching and modeling ligand docking and scoring, areas vital to pharmaceutical development. 

He has served on numerous editorial boards including as Editor-in-Chief, has 550 publications which have been cited more than 36,000 times, mentored over 70 successful PhD students, and was awarded 91 research grants and contracts. 

He has also received numerous awards: ACS CINF (Chemical Information Division) Herman Skolnik Award (1993), Kent Strix Award of the Institute of Information Scientists (2001), Mike Lynch Award from the Chemical Structure Association Trust (2002), ACS Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research (2005), ACS Patterson-Crane Award (2010), and Jason Farradane Award of the UK e-Information Group (2012). 

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