Egon Willighagen

•  Mar 2007 
  Blue Obelisk Award View website

Egon Willighagen studied Chemistry at the University of Nijmegen in
the Netherlands (1993-2001) with a major in chemometrics at the
Deparment of Analytical Chemistry (Prof. L.M.C. Buydens) studying the
unsupervised classfication of polymorphic organic crystal structures.
He continued his studies in the same group on the relation of
representation of molecular knowledge and machine learning during his
PhD (ISBN:978-90-9022806-8). Taking advantage of his extra-curriculum
research in (open source) cheminformatics, he worked on on methods to
optimize the amount of information gained from pattern recognition
methods in the fields of Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships
(QSAR), supervised clustering and prediction of properties of organic
crystal structures, the general reduction of error introduced in
exchange of chemical data, and on improving the reproducibility of
data analysis in this field in general. This research was partly
performed at the European Bioinformatics Institute (Prof. J. Thornton)
and the University of Cambridge (Prof. P. Murray-Rust). After his PhD
research he continued his efforts on reducing the error introduced by
data aggregation and cheminformatics toolkits with postdoctoral
research in Cologne (dr C. Steinbeck), and Wageningen University and
the Netherlands Metabolomics Center (dr. R. Van Ham) in the area of
metabolite identification, and after that in proteochemometrics at
Uppsala University (Prof. J. Wikberg). After a short project in text
mining for chemistry back at the University of Cambridge (Prof. P.
Murray-Rust), Willighagen started in 2011 a post-doc at the Institute
of Environmental Medicine of the Karolinska Intitute (Prof. B. Fadeel,
and Prof. R. Grafström) working on applications of cheminformatic in
toxicology. Willighagen is editorial member for two journals in the
field cheminformatics and scientific computing, and member of advisory
boards of various international organisations, and has been awarded
for his contributions to open science in cheminformatics.