In recognition of her pioneering research in chemical structure analysis, visionary educational leadership, and enduring dedication to advancing scientific collaboration, Professor Val Gillet has been awarded the 2025 Mike Lynch Award by the Trustees of the CSA Trust.
The Trustees are proud to honor Professor Gillet for her outstanding and innovative contributions to the field of Chemoinformatics. Her influential body of work – widely cited and highly regarded – has shaped the Chemoinformatics landscape and driven progress in pharmaceutical research and development.
In parallel with her research achievements, Professor Gillet has played a central role in building and refining the Chemoinformatics educational program at the University of Sheffield. Under her supervision, the program has earned international recognition as a hub of excellence for research and training. She is also co-author of a foundational textbook that remains a key reference in the field.
Beyond her academic accomplishments, Professor Gillet has been instrumental in fostering collaboration and visibility within Chemoinformatics. Her longstanding support of the Cheminformatics Conference in Sheffield and the International Conference on Chemical Structures in Noordwijkerhout has helped elevate them to the field’s most prominent international gatherings.
Val Gillet is a Professor of Chemoinformatics at the University of Sheffield, where she leads the Chemoinformatics Research Group within School of Information, Journalism and Communication.
The CSA Trust is an internationally recognized, registered charity that promotes education, research, and development in fields related to chemical structures and cheminformatics.
It will continue a well-established conference series that begun in 1973 as a workshop on Computer Representation and Manipulation of Chemical Information sponsored by the NATO Advanced Study Institute and thereafter was held under its new name every third year starting in 1987.
The 2025 conference will build on the experience of the past successful editions to offer a strong scientific program which covers all aspects of cheminformatics and molecular modeling, including for example structure-activity relationships, virtual screening, modeling metabolite networks, etc.
Participants discuss research as well as relevant technological and algorithm developments in handling and visualization of chemical structure data, workflows for complex cheminformatic analysis and machine learning. The conference fosters cooperation among organizations and researchers involved in the increasingly interwoven fields of cheminformatics and bioinformatics and combines in-depth technical presentations with ample opportunities for one-on-one discussions with the presenters.
The ICCS is seeking presentations of novel research and emerging technologies for the following Plenary Sessions.
Advanced Cheminformatics Techniques
Molecular Similarity and Diversity Analysis
Chemical Literature and Patent Mining
Spectroscopy and Structure Elucidation
(Automated) Reaction Handling and Optimization
Papers may be based on method and algorithm development as well as applications and case studies. Highest standards of scientific quality and validation of results will be required.
Scientific Topics
Advanced Cheminformatics Techniques o Molecular Similarity and Diversity Analysis o Chemical Literature and Patent Mining o Spectroscopy and Structure Elucidation o (Automated) Reaction Handling and Optimization
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and QSAR o Consensus, Federated Learning, and Uncertainty Quantification o Advances in Large Language Models for Chemistry o Synthetic Accessibility and Retrosynthesis Planning o Multi-objective and Many-objective Optimization in Drug Design
Integrative Structure-Based Drug Design o Molecular Dynamics and Free Energy Calculations o Structure-based and Rational Drug Design Innovations o Modeling Complex Protein Interactions o Computer-Assisted Protein Design and Engineering
New Modalities and Large Chemical Data Sets o Design, Profiling, and Comparison of Compound Collections o Advances in DNA Encoded Libraries o Covalent inhibitors and PROTACS o Biologics and oligonucleotides
Open Science, Omics, and Natural Products o Open Access Publishing and Collaborative Platforms o Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) o Advances in X-omics o Natural Product Drug Discovery
They also welcome contributions in other aspects of the computer handling of chemical structure information, such as: o automatic structure elucidation o combinatorial chemistry and diversity analysis, o electronic publishing o MM or QM/MM simulations o modeling of ADME properties o material sciences o analysis and prediction of structures, o grid and cloud computing in cheminformatics
From the submissions, the program committee and the scientific advisory board will select around 30 papers for the plenary sessions. All submissions that cannot be included in the plenary sessions will be automatically considered for the poster sessions.
Mike Lynch Award
The CSA Trust Mike Lynch Award is given on a triennial basis 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. Traditionally the award is presented on the opening night of the ICCS. CSA Trust 2025 Mike Lynch Award – Call for Nominations. Deadline is 31 August 2024. | Previous Recipients
The ICCS Conference is jointly supported by:
Division of Chemical Information of the American Chemical Society (ACS)
Chemical Structure Association Trust (CSA Trust)
Division of Chemical Information and Computer Science of the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ)
Computers in Chemistry Division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh)
Royal Netherlands Chemical Society (KNCV)
Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
The CSA Trust is an internationally-recognised, registered charity which promotes education, research and development in fields related to chemical structures and cheminformatics.
The Mike Lynch Award recognises and encourages 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. The awardee will receive an honorarium and memento, and will be invited to make a presentation at a suitable chemistry conference.
To make a nomination, please submit (a) an account of the nominee’s accomplishments and the specific relevant work that is to be recognized (maximum one page); and (b) a brief biographical sketch, including a statement of academic qualifications, and contact information. These should be submitted by email to the Secretary of the CSA Trust by May 31, 2020.
Nominations of previous winners of other awards are welcome, provided that the specific relevant work to be recognized for the Mike Lynch Award is distinct from that for which the other award was presented.
All nominations will be reviewed by the CSA Trustees, and the awardee will be announced at the Fall American Chemical Society National Meeting to be held in San Francisco in August 2020.
Mike Lynch is the Professor Emeritus in the Information School of the University of Sheffield, England, and is an acknowledged cheminformatics pioneer. The Mike Lynch Award was instituted in 2002, and the previous winners listed below received their awards and made presentations at the triennial International Conference on Chemical Structures, Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands.
2018: Rudy Potenzone: 40+ year career as a provider of in-house informatics services and a creator and implementer of innovative informatics software solutions including SciFinder.
2014: Steve Heller, Alan McNaught, Igor Pletnev, Steve Stein, Dmitrii Tchekhovskoi: conception and development of the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier InChI.
2011: Engelbert Zass: lifetime career devoted to education in chemical information with an emphasis on database searching and the role of the intermediary.
2008: Alexander (Sandy) Lawson: major contributions to chemical information handling and structure representation, particularly in the development of the Beilstein database and software.
2005: Johann Gasteiger: outstanding accomplishments in the fields of computational chemistry and structure elucidation.
2002: Peter Willett: pioneering work in maintaining and nurturing an academic centre of excellence in cheminformatics teaching and research with an emphasis on computational techniques for the processing of chemical and biological information.
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 