An Indiana University doctoral student who is helping develop the computer tools needed to accelerate new pharmaceutical discoveries is being recognized for his work by the American Chemical Society
Xiao Dong is the recipient of Cinf-IO Informatics Scholarship for Scientific Excellence sponsored by the American Chemical Society's division of chemical information (Cinf).
Dong will be presented the scholarship when he attends the 231st National Meeting of ACS on 28 March 2006 in Atlanta.
Dong, working under the direction of David Wild, assistant professor of informatics, is part of a team building a prototype of a web service and intelligent agent-based system for the potential deployment in the pharmaceutical industry.
It is expected the development of such tools will enable scientists to more quickly amass the information they need in their decision-making about which chemical compounds are most likely to be safe, effective drugs.
"Using this system, scientists will be able to make high-level requests to intelligent agents, who then use other agents and web services to carry out their requests using a variety of computational tools and databases," says Dong, who also will present a poster and explain his work at the Atlanta gathering.
The $1000 scholarship Dong will receive from Cinf is funded by IO Informatics , a California-based software company.
His recognition also earns the School of Informatics a free annual license of that company's software.
Dong has a background in both chemistry and computer science.
He received his bachelor's degree in chemical physics from the University of Science and Technology of China and his master's degree in computing from Marquette University.
In addition, he conducted graduate work in chemistry, bioinformatics and electrical engineering.
Last autumn, Dong became the fourth recipient of the Elsevier MDL Excellence in Informatics Fellowship at the School of Informatics.
Chemical informatics is the application of computer technology to chemistry in all of its manifestations, particularly in the drug-manufacturing industry.
