Antony John Williams

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Antony Williams
Born
Antony John Williams

St Asaph, Denbighshire, Wales
NationalityBritish
Alma mater
Known for
AwardsJim Gray e-Science award (2012)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisHigh pressure NMR and relaxation studies of alkyl chain systems (1988)
Doctoral advisorDuncan G. Gillies[citation needed]
William's voice
recorded December 2014
Websitewww.chemconnector.com

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.[2][3] 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[4] and an author.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11]

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

molecules
similar in structure to Vitamin E.

Williams earned his

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".[12] 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.[13] He also used the Cobalt-59 NMR chemical shift for cobalt (III) hexacyanide as both a temperature and pressure probe.[14]
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

EPR spectroscopy
to perform single-crystal studies of organometallics compounds.

Career

In 1991, Williams joined

2D-NMR experiments examining Selenium exchange in mixed-halogen systems.[15] He also performed Silicon-29 and Tellurium-125
NMR studies.

In 1992 Williams left Canada for

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,[17] 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,[18][19]

In 1997 he started work for a Canadian start-up company,

Computer Assisted structure Elucidation, so-called CASE systems.[24][25][26][27][28][29] The CASE tools have been used for the purpose of structure revision whereby algorithms have been demonstrated to outperform human interpretation of spectral data.[30]
While at ACD/Labs Williams was involved in a number of industry firsts[citation needed] including

  1. producing a chemical dictionary on a Palm Computer and Pocket PC,[31]
  2. working with Gary E. Martin and other colleagues to develop new NMR processing techniques using covariance-based approaches,[32][33][34][35]
  3. the introduction of fuzzy-logic based approaches to computer-assisted structure elucidation and 4) Approaches for automated structure verification.[36]

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

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.[39][40]

In May 2009 the Royal Society of Chemistry announced that it had acquired ChemSpider.[41] 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[42] and tools for mass spectrometry.[43]

Williams has contributed to the world of "Mobile Chemistry"[44] 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.[45]

Open science advocacy

Williams introduced an

Open Notebook Science.[46] Williams is an advocate for freeing pre-clinical data from the pharmaceutical industry on the internet.[47][48][49] 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.[50][51][52]

Williams, himself a longtime contributor to Wikipedia has been vocal in questioning the notability requirements of Wikipedia itself, comparing pornstars and scientists.[53][54]

Awards and honors

Williams was the winner of the Jim Gray e-Science award in 2012 [55] and the North Carolina American Chemical Society Distinguished Speaker of the Year Award in 2016.[56]

References

  1. PMID 22683805
    .
  2. ^ Antony John Williams publications indexed by Google Scholar
  3. ^ Staff. "2014-BIT-Brochure" (PDF). 2014 Bio-IT World Expo. Cambridge Healthtech Institute. pp. 3 (col 2). Retrieved 15 June 2016. Antony Williams, Ph.D., Vice President, Strategic Development; Head, Cheminformatics for the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
  4. ^ ChemConnector Website
  5. ISBN 978-0-9735913-0-9
  6. ISBN 978-0-470-63803-3
  7. ^ Antony John Williams publications from Europe PubMed Central
  8. ^ Antony Williams on LinkedIn.com
  9. ^ Williams' Mendeley Profile
  10. ^ Antony Williams ChemConnector Blog Archived January 28, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  11. ^ Antony John Williams's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  12. ^ Williams, Antony John (1988). High pressure NMR and relaxation studies of alkyl chain systems (PhD thesis). University of Liverpool.(subscription required)
  13. doi:10.1021/j100370a001
    .
  14. S2CID 98518973
    .
  15. doi:10.1021/ic00048a018
    .
  16. doi:10.1021/la00024a014
    .
  17. doi:10.1016/S0165-9936(97)00046-0
    .
  18. ^ Photographic emulsion having an improved speed. US Patent 6,040,129
  19. ^ Process for the manufacture of dihydropyrimidines, US Patent 5,576,432
  20. doi:10.3390/40900255
    .
  21. ISBN 978-1-4200-7649-3
    .
  22. PMID 19649862
    .
  23. PMID 18293952
    .
  24. PMID 17385849
    .
  25. doi:10.1016/j.pnmrs.2007.04.003
    .
  26. doi:10.1016/j.tet.2005.08.022
    .
  27. doi:10.1002/jhet.5570390619
    .
  28. doi:10.1002/mrc.1227
    .
  29. doi:10.1002/jhet.5570400610
    .
  30. S2CID 37849167
    .
  31. ^ "Chemistry Databases in the Palm and in the Pocket". Archived from the original on 18 December 2010. Retrieved 17 February 2011.
  32. S2CID 26808858
    .
  33. S2CID 46106410
    .
  34. S2CID 34281811
    .
  35. S2CID 41359162
    .
  36. S2CID 25476827
    .
  37. doi:10.1021/ed100697w
    .
  38. ^ 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
  39. PMID 18549975
    .
  40. PMID 21871970
    .
  41. ^ "to fulfill its strategic objective of disseminating knowledge to the chemical community and advancing the chemical sciences"
  42. ^ EPA personal profile
  43. S2CID 31754962
    .
  44. ^ A.J. Williams, Mobile Chemistry – Chemistry in Your Hands and In Your Face, Chemistry World, May 2010
  45. PMID 20298527
    .
  46. doi:10.1038/npre.2008.1505.1
    .
  47. PMID 20024044
    .
  48. ^ 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
  49. PMID 20732447
    .
  50. PMID 20732447
    .
  51. doi:10.1039/C0MD00129E
    .
  52. PMID 22683805
    .
  53. ^ "» Why are pornstars more notable than scientists on Wikipedia? ChemConnector Blog".
  54. ^ "Why are pornstars more notable than scientists on Wikipedia? | Wikimedian in Residence". Archived from the original on 28 March 2012. Retrieved 8 December 2011.
  55. ^ Jim Gray eScience Award, Antony Williams
  56. ^ NC ACS Distinguished Speaker of the Year Award, Antony Williams

External links

Scholia has a profile for Antony John Williams (Q4777220).
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