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...

Over 40 of Peter Willett’s ex-PhD students and long-time collaborators gathered in Sheffield in mid-September to celebrate Peter’s long and very influential career and to thank him for the personal support that he has provided to very many throughout this time. It is a mark of the very high regard in which Peter is held that so many people attended. They had travelled from as far as Canada, North America, Germany and Taiwan, as well as from all over the UK. Many of the attendees are now in very influential positions of their own including in academia, software companies and industry. Their connections to Peter spanned the full range of Peter’s career with one of his early PhD students having obtained her PhD over 30 years ago. A number of presentations were given that included reflections on Peter’s contribution to the fields of Chemoinformatics, Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics, a “Peter Willett: This is your Life” tribute, as well as many personal messages of thank...

The triennial conference on Chemoinformatics was held at the University of Sheffield Edge building earlier this month, organised by our own Professors Val Gillet and Peter Willett and Dr Antonio de la Vega de Leon. A new prize has been established at the conference: The Peter Willett Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation, established by the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group. The establishment of the prize is in recognition of Peter's outstanding contributions to the field, for which he was warmly congratulated. The Chemoinformatics research group at the conference The first winner of the prize is PhD student James Webster for his poster entitled 'Reaction Vector Based Monte Carlo Tree Search for De Novo Design'. James Webster with his poster and award In addition, PhD students Christina Founti, Giammy Ghiandoni and Jess Stacey were all given honourable mentions for their posters. The posters were judged by...

Professor Val Gillet and six other members of the Chemoinformatics Research Group are attending the 11th International Conference on Chemical Structures in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, May 27-31st 2018. This is the major international conference in the field, with over 200 delegates from more than 20 countries. As usual, the Sheffield Chemoinformatics Group is making a strong contribution to the meeting with one oral presentation (Matt Seddon) and three posters (Antonio de le Vega de Leon, Christina Founti and Gian Marco Ghiandoni). Professor Gillet is on the Scientific Advisory Board and is a member of the Poster Jury. The final session of the meeting on Chemoinformatics is dedicated to Prof. Peter Willett to celebrate his outstanding contribution to the field over 40 years. Val will chair this session and will open it by presenting some highlights of Peter’s career.

We are delighted to say that Professor Peter Willett has been awarded honorary membership of the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society (MGMS), an international society for the application of computer techniques for the discovery of novel drugs. Honorary membership is bestowed on people who have made an excellent and lasting contribution to the MGMS's area of science, with Peter's award reflecting his significant contributions to the development of chemoinformatics over the last forty years. There are 8 current honorary members ,one of whom, Martin Karplus, is a Nobel Prize winner!

The latest edition of the Aslib Journal of Information Management is a special issue honouring Mark Hepworth, Emeritus Professor at Loughborough University and an alumnus of the Sheffield Information School, who died on 21 December 2016. For many years he pushed forward the boundaries in studies of people's information behaviour and experience. To honour Mark's contribution to library and information science, his friends, colleagues and students contributed articles to the issue, reflecting topics that characterised his career: health information, development studies and information behaviour. Mark studied an MSc in Information Studies at the Information School before moving into a career that took him from industry into academia. He worked at Datasolve Limited in customer support care before becoming Business Development Manager for the Pearson/Financial Times group. He was appointed Senior Lecturer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 1993 where he helped t...