Dr. Wendy Warr will be the recipient of the 2020 Herman
Skolnik Award presented by the ACS Division of Chemical Information, for
her contributions to the fields of chemical information and a number of
related fields that impinge on chemical information including chemical
structure representation, substructure searching, retrosynthesis and reaction
prediction
The prize consists of a $3,000 honorarium and a
plaque. Dr. Warr will also be invited to organize an award symposium at the Fall
2020 ACS National Meeting to be held in San Francisco.
For more than 40 years, Dr. Warr has had a global
influence on chemical information and cheminformatics. She provides services to
the chemical information, cheminformatics and computational chemistry
communities worldwide, and has evolved into a key opinion leader and trend
watcher. These trends have included: combinatorial chemistry, chemistry and the
Internet, and intranet and ethernet in industry (these three in the early
1990s), outsourcing, changing pharma R&D strategies (these two in the early
2000s), and continue to today’s AI, cloud computing, and blockchain.
She formed her current employment, Wendy Warr &
Associates, in 1992. Since that time she has been successfully supplying
business and competitive intelligence services to a broad spectrum of clients
across the world. Her success stems from her extensive network, incredible
energy, and deep curiosity, and her specialized market knowledge of chemical
information, computational chemistry, drug discovery, cheminformatics, STM
publishing, and scientific communication. Her clients have included at least 15
major pharmaceutical and chemical companies, venture capitalists, financial
analysts, all of the well-known chemistry publishers, software companies, and
many cheminformatics and analytical chemistry companies, as well as many smaller
commercial and not-for-profit or academic organizations. Scientific database
producers have benefited from her expert counsel and services in recent years.
Dr. Warr obtained her doctoral degree (D. Phil.) >
from the University of Oxford in 1971, and subsequently joined ICI
Pharmaceuticals where she held multiple positions culminating in leading the
department of Information Services. In 1992, Dr. Warr established her own
company, Wendy Warr & Associates, that provides business and competitive
intelligence services to a broad spectrum of clients in the United States,
Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and Asia.
She has played key roles in several professional
organizations including the American Chemical Society, Royal Society of
Chemistry, German Chemical Society, Society of Chemical Industry, Chemical
Structure Association Trust and the Institute of Information
Scientists, and in many cases has been instrumental in shaping their
activities.
She has published over 80 articles in academic
journals and over 100 commercial reports, along with numerous invited lectures
at venues such as NIST, Washington DC and University of Strasbourg, France. She
has been an Associate Editor for the Journal of Chemical Information and
Modeling (as well as its predecessor, the Journal of Chemical Information and
Computer Sciences). She has received numerous awards and honors
including the Ernie Hyde Award of the Chemical Structure Association (1984), and
is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Fellow of the Chartered
Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
Rajarshi Guha
Chair, CINF Awards Committee