Information School News

As Head of the Information School, I would like to welcome all of those who are joining to study with us. I understand that this is a new start for you and I hope you have found your first few weeks with us to be beneficial. Like yourselves, this year is a new start for me too. It is the first year in my current term as Head of the Information School. I have been Head of the School previously, and I am excited to see that the School is still evolving to meet the needs of our students and employers with our cutting-edge courses and technological advances. That said, it’s not too much of a new start for me: After completing a degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, I took a short term research post in the Department of Information Studies (as the Information School was then called). This post fueled my interest in the discipline and I took the MSc in Information Science and subsequent PhD. Having spent such a long time at this School, and in higher education in the UK, I am abl...

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.

Last month University of Sheffield’s Information School was privileged to be the first University in the UK to host the prestigious iConference. Held at the end of March in Sheffield, in collaboration with Northumbria University, the iConference was attended by over 400 delegates from around the world and across the library and information field. This year’s theme focused on ‘Transforming Digital Worlds’ with keynote sessions from eminent figures in the information world including: Dr Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC Research), Dr Susan Dumais, (Microsoft Research) and Professor Luciano Floridi, (Oxford Internet Institute). “The keynotes were real highlights of the iConference”, says Professor Gillet, Conference Chair and Professor of Chemoinformatics at the Information School. “We had three well-known figures in the field summarising their work and giving their perspectives on different aspects of the information field. The iSchools organisation often talks about the triad of in...

Matt Seddon, PhD student in the Chemoinformatics research group, has won the CINF Scholarship for Scientific Excellence at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, April 2-6. The scholarship program of the Division of Chemical Information (CINF) is designed to reward graduate and postdoctoral students in chemical information and related sciences for scientific excellence. The award was made for his PhD work which he presented as a long abstract and in poster format: Global spectral and diffusion geometry descriptors of 3D molecular shape for virtual screening Authors: Matthew Seddon, David Cosgrove, Martin Packer and Val Gillet Matt also gave an oral presentation. Matt Seddon (second from right) and colleagues Matt's PhD is being funded by a BBSRC Industrial CASE Partnership Studentship in collaboration with AstraZeneca. He is supervised by Professor Val Gillet.

The Information School's recent visit to China to launch its partnership with Wuhan University's School of Information Management was a great success. Head of School Professor Val Gillet, Dr Miguel Nunes and Dr Angela Lin visited Wuhan University at the end of November 2014 where they met with  Deans and the Head of the International Office before delivering a presentation to Wuhan students.  They presented information about the Information School and its postgraduate study opportunities which students from Wuhan have the opportunity to experience  as part of the partnership established between the two universities . Wuhan University reported on the visit on their website . During their visit to China, Professor Gillet, Dr Nunes and Dr Lin also visited  Nanjing University’s School of Information Management and the School of Information Resources Management at the University of Renmin, Beijing. The University of Renmin reporte...

Professor Val Gillet, Head of School at the Information School, will be in Bari from 8 to 10 December 2014 at the kick off meeting for an EU-IAPP (Industry Academia Partnerships and Pathways) project which will explore a "Diagnostic and Drug Discovery Initiative for Alzheimer’s Disease". The University of Sheffield is represented in this project by Professor Gillet and by Professor Beining Chen, Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the University's Department of Chemistry.  Professor Chen is the project lead and the orher project partners are are Eli Lilly of Bari SME Biofordrug, Lisbon Univeristy and Canadian company Amorfit. The scheme is part of the Marie Curie FP7 scheme.  It includes a considerable amount of exchange of existing researchers (both PhD and more established).  It will also fund 5 post-doctoral researchers, two of which will come to the University of Sheffield.  One will be based in the Information School and one in the Department of Chemistr...

The Information School has established a collaborative partnership with Wuhan University’s School of Information Management. Wuhan University is a top 10 University in China and a member of Project 211 and Project 985.  The School of Information Management at Wuhan was founded in 1920 and is China’s leading school in the field. Both the Information School and Wuhan’s School of Information Management are members of the prestigious international iSchools movement. The partnership between the two schools is a collaborative education programme which aims to bring 20 students from Wuhan University’s School of Information Management to study on postgraduate courses in the Information School each year. Students from Wuhan who have completed the third year of the undergraduate degree programme will be able to apply for a place to study on one of four courses taught at the Information School: MSc Digital Library Management MSc Information Management MSc Information Systems ...

Leaders from the European iSchools met in Copenhagen the weekend of November 7-8, 2013 to discuss cooperation and EU initiatives.   European iSchool leaders meet in Copenhagen to discuss cooperation and EU initiatives

The Sheffield conference on Chemoinformatics ( cisrg.shef.ac.uk/shef2013 ) is being held at The Edge and is being run by Val Gillet, John Holliday and Peter Willett on behalf of the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society and the Chemical Structure Association Trust.  The conference has brought together over 140 delegates from industry and academia from across the globe to discuss the latest techniques in computer-aided drug discovery.  With over 75 oral and poster presentations and an exhibition from leading software companies, it has been a very busy but enjoyable three days.

The Call for papers has recently appeared for the 6th Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics .  This major international meeting, which is again being co-sponsored by the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society and by  the Chemical Structure Association Trust, will be held at The Edge, University of Sheffield, 22nd-24th July 2013.

Peter Willett attended the Internet Librarian International 2012 conference in Olympia, where he received the Jason Farradane Award on behalf of the School's Chemoinformatics Research Group (Val Gillet, John Holliday and Peter Willett). Next week he will be visiting the USA to give talks on "Introduction to chemoinformatics" at Fordham University and "Fusing database rankings in similarity-based virtual screening" at Rutgers University.

The Information School's Chemoinformatics Research Group has been awarded the 2012 UKeiG Jason Farradane Award , in recognition of its outstanding 40 year contribution to the information field. The prize is awarded to the three current members of the group,  Professor Val Gillet , Dr John Holliday and Professor Peter Willett . The judges recognised the Group's status as one of the world's leading centres of chemoinformatics research, a major contributor to the field of information science, and an exemplar in raising the profile of the information profession. The School has a long association with the Farradane prize. Its second recipient was long time member of staff Professor Mike Lynch in 1980.

Val Gillet is presenting a paper on "Multiobjective design of drug-like molecules" at a workshop on multi-disciplinary integration and optimisation in science and engineering at University College London on April 2nd.

Val Gillet, Sonny Gan and Jorge Valencia, members of the Chemoinformatics Research Group, are all presenting at the Spring 2012 American Chemical Society Meeting in San Diego, March 25-29th. Val is presenting an oral paper on "De novo design of synthetically accessible molecules". Sonny and Jorge are presenting posters on "Identification of alternative druggable targets for prion diseases" and "A Lanczos-based approach to the spectral clustering of chemical data", respectively.