January, 2019 Newsletter 6
Content of this newsletter

  • Strasbourg Summer School
  • BIGCHEM sessions in Strasbourg Summer School
  • Open Lectures at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology
  • New publications
  • Meet BIGCHEM partners
  • Next BIGCHEM Schools
Strasbourg Summer School

The second BIGCHEM summer School was held in Strasbourg, from 25 June to 29 June 2018 as part of the conference " Chemoinformatics Strasbourg Summer School 2018 ". The event was organized by Alexandre Varnek (Chairman) from the University of Strasbourg (France) together with Didier Rognan, Esther Kellenberger, Gilles Marcou and Olga Klimchuk from the same university and Didier Rognan, Dragos Horvath and Fanny Bonachera, from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France.

Two dedicated BIGCHEM sessions took place preceding the conference and following it on the 25 th June and 29 th June, respectively (see BIGCHEM sessions below for an overview).

The program included plenary lectures, poster session, oral presentations and hands-on tutorials. It covered the following topics: Big Data in chemistry, Material Informatics, Machine-Learning methods,Virtual screening techniques and In silico pharmacology. The full program can be reached here.

Participants of the BIGCHEM 2 nd summer school.
BIGCHEM sessions in Strasbourg Summer School

In the pre-conference event of Monday 25 th June, BIGCHEM fellows presented their research topics. Afterwards, BIGCHEM partners joined on the Supervisory Board and General assembly meetings. The post-conference BIGCHEM event on Friday 29 th June consisted on two talks on “Mass-spectroscopy technique” given by Dr. Yannick François (Unistra) and “Intellectual property: copyright and patents” given by Damien Quelier and Jean-Jacques Kress (cabinet NUSS, Strasbourg).

BIGCHEM participants with the Nobel Prize laureate Prof. Jean-Pierre Sauvage
Oliver Laufkötter, BIGCHEM ESR, about his experience at BIGCHEM School
Oliver's impression Strasbourg
" After completing my bachelor study in New Zealand, I moved to Germany to do my Master’s and have now begun my PhD as a BIGCHEM fellow. The BIGCHEM school in Strasbourg was the first scientific conference I have attended. The City of Strasbourg was a beautiful location to hold the summer school, also providing me with my first taste of French culture. There were many interesting talks covering a wide variety of research areas which I was not familiar with, but I embraced this as a useful introduction into the world of cheminformatics. It was also a great opportunity to talk with peers in the field and gather valuable information for my own research, as well as to meet the other fellows for the first time. The chance to network with people from all around the world was a very beneficial and enjoyable experience, and I very much look forward to the rest of my time with BIGCHEM".

Open Lectures at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology
The Department of Life Science Informatics, University of Bonn, and BIGCHEM organized an open Workshop holding open lectures at the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology in Bonn (Germany) on the 4 th and 5 th September, 2018.

The program comprised lectures from Prof. Dr. Holger Fröhlich (Union Chimique Belge), Prof. Dr. J. B. Brown (Kyoto University), Prof. Dr. Jürgen Bajorath (University of Bonn) as well as talks from students of the BIGCHEM Innovative Training Network and the Life Science Informatics Master Program in Bonn. The talks covered different aspects on the Chemogenomics and Chemoinformatics fields including Binary Classification Metric Surfaces, prediction of compound activity using Machine Learning methods,

concepts of Chemogenomics and Chemical Biology, identification of target pairs with synergistic effects and selectivity of kinase inhibitors. An extra lecture was dedicated to career opportunities of life science informatics students in industry. A lively open discussion closed the workshop.
Open_lectures
BIGCHEM Fellow Ms. Raquel Rodriguez Pérez with Prof. J. Bajorath and guest lecturer
Prof. J.B. Brown (right, Kyoto University, Japan).

New publications


See full list of project publications at the BIGCHEM web site.

Meet BIGCHEM partners at:

  • ACS meeting. 1-2 April 2019, Orlando in "web-based cheminformatics platforms" session. Key speaker Prof.Dr.Jean-Louis Reymond.


Next BIGCHEM Schools

  • The fifth BIGCHEM School with the participation of all BIGCHEM fellows and project partners will take place in the Gothenburg (Sweden) site of AstraZeneca during 6-12th May 2019.

  • The final BIGCHEM Conference will be co-organized with the ICANN 2019 - International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks during 17-19th September 2019 in Munich. ICANN is an annual conference of the European Neural Network Society (ENNS).



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Please follow this link to subscribe to our newsletters. Until the end of the project (December 2019) three more Newsletters will be delivered. You can access previous newsletters at the BIGCHEM web site .

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 676434. 
Disclaimer: the newsletter reflects only the authors’ view and neither the European Commission nor the Research Executive Agency are responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.