The American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Information is
pleased to announce that Prof. Alexandre Varnek has been selected to receive the
2024 Herman Skolnik Award for his contributions to the development of
chemoinformatics education & training and his contributions to methodologies
for molecular representations and modeling of small molecules &
reactions.
The prize consists of a $3,000 honorarium and a plaque. Prof.
Varnek will also be invited to organize an award symposium at the Fall 2024 ACS
National Meeting to be held in Denver.
Prof. Varnek has been highly
committed to education and training. He founded the Chemoinformatics Master
Program at the University of Strasbourg and extended this program through
student exchange initiatives leading to a joint international Master Program In
Silico Drug Design, in partnership with Paris-Cité and the University of
Milan, and then to theEuropean Erasmus Mundus project
“ChemoinformaticsPlus” involving universities of Strasbourg, Kyiv,
Ljubljana, Milan, Lisbon, Paris and Bar-Ilan. In addition, he continues to
organize the International Strasbourg Summer School in Chemoinformatics that
attracts leading investigators in the field and fosters international
collaborations. He was involved in establishing the EU-funded BIGCHEM training
network further emphasizes his dedication to education. More globally, he has
also been invited to build new chemoinformatics laboratories and research units
at the Federal University of Kazan, Russia, and Hokkaido University, Japan, and
continues to be closely involved in those research programs.
In parallel
to his work on pedagogy, Prof. Varnek research has a wide variety of topics in
QSAR modeling of molecules and reactions. These include the introduction of the
ISIDA fragment descriptors, which have proven instrumental in inductive and
transductive learning and extensions to conventional QSAR that allow us to model
complex systems, such as non-additive mixtures and chemical reactions His work
on the Condensed Graph of Reaction (CGR) formalism is a key contribution to the
representation of chemical reactions. The CGR-based descriptors have been
instrumental in modeling chemical transformations. Prof. Varnek has pioneered
the use of Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM) for both the visualization and
modeling of chemical and biological property spaces.
Beyond academics,
Prof. Varnek has served the scientific community by co-founding the French
Chemoinformatics Society and was appointed by CNRS to direct the the French
National Research Network in Chemoinformatics (GDR Chemoinformatique).
In
summary, this award recognizes Prof. Varnek as a pioneer in chemoinformatics,
contributing key methodological advances in the representation and modeling of
chemical structures, and developing curricula and training programs, at the
national and international levels that have led to the creation of scientific
networks that foster communication, knowledge exchange and partnerships that
contribute to further advancing the field.
Rajarshi Guha
Chair,
ACS CINF Awards Committee
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