FIZ CHEMIE to announce this year’s Winners of "FIZ CHEMIE - CINF Scholarship for Scientific Excellence"

29-08-2011: At the Fall 2011 ACS National Meeting in Denver, Colorado, USA, Dr Felix Rudolphi, Barun Bhhatarai, PhD, and Karen L. Salazar, PhD were announced the winners of this year´s "CINF-FIZ Scholarship for Scientific Excellence". The scholarship program of the Division of Chemical Information (CINF) of the American Chemical Society (ACS) intends to promote advancement in the field of computer-aided chemical information. The award is funded by the German Chemistry Information Center FIZ CHEMIE with $1000 each.

The honored scientists were invited to present their contributions fostering computer-aided chemical preparation, research collaboration and the use of specialized knowledge during the Welcoming Reception of the CINF Division at the ACS Meeting.

Felix Rudolphi was granted the scholarship for his contribution: "Development of an open source Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN)". The information and networking-tool facilitates planning and documentation of chemical reactions as well as further analysis of the collected data. It is a web-based open source tool for collaboration and knowledge exchange within a group of researchers. Rudolphi holds a diploma in chemistry. He was given his doctoral degree for the programming of an ELN and its applicaton to the development of new decarboxylating cross-coupling reactions

Barun Bhhatarai is honored for his contribution "SMARTNames: A new framework to organize chemical structural information based on chemically relevant functional groups". SMARTNames is an ontological description of chemical functional groups (CFGs), modeled in an ontology leveraging the web ontology language OWL 2.0. The framework already was used to analyze several databases providing new insight that is founded in the chemically meaningful definitions of CFCs. Barun Bhhatarai joined the CCS as a Post Doctoral Associate. He obtained his PhD in chemoinformatics from Clarkson University in New York.

Karen Salazar has been awarded the FIZ-CINF scholarship for the "Introduction of InChI to researchers in the Department of Chemistry at Louisiana State University" carried out using a systematic approach. InChI, developed by IUPAC in collaboration with NIST, is a universal, non-proprietary method to identifiy chemical compounds provided in electronic databases and networks. It converts chemical structures into machine-readable strings. The new approach to introduce InChI to scientist presented by Salazar can also be implemented in other institutions. Karen Salazar has a PhD in Organic Chemistry from The University of Oklahoma and has worked in industry both as Senior R&D Chemist and as Senior Customer Technical Service Chemist.