Information School News

Friday, 20th December marks the end of an era for the Information School. Our very own Professor Peter Willett is retiring, having joined the department following the completion of his MA in Natural Sciences (Chemistry) from Oxford University in 1975. At the time, the School was known as the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science and Peter studied for an MSc in Information Science. Following the completion of his MSc, Peter undertook a PhD on the indexing of chemical reactions and post-doctoral work on the automatic classification of document databases. Peter was appointed to a lecturership in 1979, was awarded a personal chair in 1991 and a DSc in 1997. We are privileged that Professor Willett has spent his entire professional career here in the School. Professor Willett reminisces, “It was a very different world.  In 1975, one could go through one's entire primary, secondary and tertiary education without going anywhere near a computer, so it came...

PhD student Gianmarco Ghiandoni recently attended well known chemoinformatics conference GCC 2019 , in Mainz, Germany, as an official speaker. 'I presented some content from my PhD project which describes the use of Reaction Class Recommendation models in de novo Drug Design', says Gianmarco. 'These models have shown to have a role as deterministic search components which maximise the chance of generating meaningful synthetic patterns in de novo design and compound optimisation.' 'In addition to this, the application of these models has resulted to yield product libraries characterised by higher synthetic accessibility, whilst reducing drastically the algorithmic enumeration times.'