Английская Википедия:Antony John Williams

Материал из Онлайн справочника
Перейти к навигацииПерейти к поиску

Шаблон:Short description Шаблон:Use dmy dates Шаблон:Infobox scientist Antony John Williams is a British chemist and expert in the fields of both nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and cheminformatics at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.[1][2] He is the founder of the ChemSpider website that was purchased by the Royal Society of Chemistry in May 2009. He is a science blogger[3] and an author.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]

Early life and education

Antony Williams was born in St Asaph, Wales, June 1964 to Ernest Edward Williams, owner of a building contracting firm, and Eirlys Elizabeth Williams. He has one older sister, Rae. He grew up in a small village near Caerwys.

Williams attended Primary School in both Holywell and Nannerch until 1975. From the age of eleven, he attended Alun School where he received A-levels in mathematics, geography, and chemistry.

Williams earned his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Liverpool, in 1985, writing an undergraduate dissertation on "Spectroscopic Studies of Vitamin E Related Systems" where he applied both electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) and Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) to the study of molecules similar in structure to Vitamin E.

Williams earned his Ph.D. in chemistry, funded by Royal Dutch Shell, from Royal Holloway, University of London in 1988 and wrote a thesis entitled "High pressure NMR and relaxation studies of alkyl chain systems".[11] He won the Bourne Medal from the University of London for this work and developed a unifying theory for modeling NMR relaxation data to examine the molecular motions of alkyl chains.[12] He also used the Cobalt-59 NMR chemical shift for cobalt (III) hexacyanide as both a temperature and pressure probe.[13] During his PhD he developed an interest in personal computers and wrote software programs to fit NMR relaxation data.

Williams continued his work in spectroscopy at the National Research Council (Canada) using EPR spectroscopy to perform single-crystal studies of organometallics compounds.

Career

In 1991, Williams joined Ottawa University as their NMR Facility Manager. He continued his personal interests in multinuclear NMR to perform 2D-NMR experiments examining Selenium exchange in mixed-halogen systems.[14] He also performed Silicon-29 and Tellurium-125 NMR studies.

In 1992 Williams left Canada for Rochester, NY to work for the Eastman Kodak Company as their NMR Technology Leader. At Kodak he used his previous experience in studying alkyl chain related systems to study micelles.[15] He was involved in the early adoption of Liquid Chromatography-NMR into the company and in the development of an Open Access laboratory for chemists to use roboticized analytical instrumentation to generate data. At Kodak he was part of a three-member team that developed a web-based Laboratory information management system (LIMS) system called WIMS,[16] the Web-based Information Management System and it was the first web-based LIMS system in the world to manage chemical structures and spectral data. He was granted two patents while at Kodak,[17][18]

In 1997 he started work for a Canadian start-up company, Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs) as their senior product manager. He was responsible for managing all spectroscopy, structure drawing and IUPAC nomenclature,[19][20] products. While in that role the analytical data management software was expanded to include support for mass spectrometry, infrared spectroscopy, UV-Vis spectroscopy, chromatography and other forms of analytical sciences. His research interests at that time include the development of algorithms for NMR prediction ([21] and[22]) and, specifically, development of software approaches to Computer Assisted structure Elucidation, so-called CASE systems.[23][24][25][26][27][28] The CASE tools have been used for the purpose of structure revision whereby algorithms have been demonstrated to outperform human interpretation of spectral data.[29] While at ACD/Labs Williams was involved in a number of industry firstsШаблон:Citation needed including

  1. producing a chemical dictionary on a Palm Computer and Pocket PC,[30]
  2. working with Gary E. Martin and other colleagues to develop new NMR processing techniques using covariance-based approaches,[31][32][33][34]
  3. the introduction of fuzzy-logic based approaches to computer-assisted structure elucidation and 4) Approaches for automated structure verification.[35]

While at the company he initiated a hobby project to link together chemistry databases on the web. This project was called ChemSpider. ChemSpider was formally announced at the Chicago ACS meeting in March 2007 with a database containing over 10 million compounds sourced from PubChem. In 2007 when he left ACD/Labs he was the Chief Science Officer. He became an independent consultant working with a number of software companies in the cheminformatics domain, such as SimBioSys, and with research organizations to support their cheminformatics efforts. In parallel he continued to develop the ChemSpider platform with a small group of like-minded individuals interested in the development of web-based systems to serve chemists[36][37] The site is a crowdsourced community for chemistry with chemists depositing their structure collections, spectral data and molecular properties. Williams is focused on educating the community as to the issues of data quality associated with internet chemistry databases.[38][39]

In May 2009 the Royal Society of Chemistry announced that it had acquired ChemSpider.[40] Williams joined RSC as their Vice President of Strategic Development for ChemSpider.

In May 2015 he joined the United States Environmental Protection Agency to work on the development of websites delivering public access to EPA data[41] and tools for mass spectrometry.[42]

Williams has contributed to the world of "Mobile Chemistry"[43] by contributing to the development of ChemMobi, an iPhone app for accessing millions of chemical compounds and associated data.

Williams is an advocate for Open Notebook Science and is a judge for the Open Notebook Science Challenge. He worked with Jean-Claude Bradley to deliver a web-based game for teaching the interpretation of spectral data utilizing crowdsourced spectroscopy data deposited onto ChemSpider.[44]

Open science advocacy

Williams introduced an Open Access journal, the ChemSpider Journal of Chemistry, and the development team provided novel online markup technology (ChemMANTIS – Markup And Nomenclature Transformation Integrated System) to allow crowdsourced markup of chemistry related terms linked up, where possible, to the ChemSpider database. Williams is a judge for the Open Notebook Science Challenge. He promotes the use of Open Data, particularly spectral data, publishes in Open Access journals and is an advocate for Open Notebook Science.[45] Williams is an advocate for freeing pre-clinical data from the pharmaceutical industry on the internet.[46][47][48] Williams has worked closely with Sean Ekins to advocate the release of pre-competitive pharmaceutical data to the community. He has also participated in the analysis and review of open pharmaceutical data released to the community.[49][50][51]

Williams, himself a longtime contributor to Wikipedia has been vocal in questioning the notability requirements of Wikipedia itself, comparing pornstars and scientists.[52][53]

Awards and honors

Williams was the winner of the Jim Gray e-Science award in 2012 [54] and the North Carolina American Chemical Society Distinguished Speaker of the Year Award in 2016.[55]

References

Шаблон:Reflist

External links

Шаблон:Scholia Шаблон:Authority control

  1. Шаблон:GoogleScholar
  2. Шаблон:Cite web
  3. ChemConnector Website
  4. Practical Interpretation of P-31 NMR Spectra and Computer Assisted Structure Verification, Louis Quin and Antony Williams, Шаблон:ISBN
  5. Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research, Sean Ekins, Maggie Hupcey and Antony Williams, Шаблон:ISBN
  6. Шаблон:EuropePMC
  7. Antony Williams on LinkedIn.com
  8. Williams' Mendeley Profile
  9. Antony Williams ChemConnector Blog Шаблон:Webarchive
  10. Шаблон:Scopus
  11. Шаблон:Cite thesisШаблон:Subscription required
  12. Шаблон:Cite journal
  13. Шаблон:Cite journal
  14. Шаблон:Cite journal
  15. Шаблон:Cite journal
  16. Шаблон:Cite journal
  17. Photographic emulsion having an improved speed. US Patent 6,040,129
  18. Process for the manufacture of dihydropyrimidines, US Patent 5,576,432
  19. Шаблон:Cite journal
  20. Шаблон:Cite book
  21. Шаблон:Cite journal
  22. Шаблон:Cite journal
  23. Шаблон:Cite journal
  24. Шаблон:Cite journal
  25. Шаблон:Cite journal
  26. Шаблон:Cite journal
  27. Шаблон:Cite journal
  28. Шаблон:Cite journal
  29. Шаблон:Cite journal
  30. Шаблон:Cite web
  31. Шаблон:Cite journal
  32. Шаблон:Cite journal
  33. Шаблон:Cite journal
  34. Шаблон:Cite journal
  35. Шаблон:Cite journal
  36. Шаблон:Cite journal
  37. Public Compound Databases – How ChemSpider changed the rules making molecules on the web free, Antony J. Williams in Collaborative Computational Technologies for the Life Sciences, Edited by Sean Ekins, Maggie A.Z. Hupcey and Antony J. Williams, Submitted for Publication to Wiley
  38. Шаблон:Cite journal
  39. Шаблон:Cite journal
  40. "to fulfill its strategic objective of disseminating knowledge to the chemical community and advancing the chemical sciences"
  41. EPA personal profile
  42. Шаблон:Cite journal
  43. A.J. Williams, Mobile Chemistry – Chemistry in Your Hands and In Your Face, Chemistry World, May 2010
  44. Шаблон:Cite journal
  45. Шаблон:Cite journal
  46. Шаблон:Cite journal
  47. A.J. Williams, V. Tkachenko, C. Lipinski, A. Tropsha and S. Ekins, Free Online Resources Enabling Crowdsourced, Drug Discovery World Winter 2009/10, 33-39
  48. Шаблон:Cite journal
  49. Шаблон:Cite journal
  50. Шаблон:Cite journal
  51. Шаблон:Cite journal
  52. Шаблон:Cite web
  53. Шаблон:Cite web
  54. Jim Gray eScience Award, Antony Williams
  55. NC ACS Distinguished Speaker of the Year Award, Antony Williams