Graham Richards | |
---|---|
Born | William Graham Richards 1 October 1939 [1] |
Education | |
Awards | Richard J. Bolte Sr. Award (2018) Mullard Award (1998) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Quantum mechanics Theoretical chemistry |
Institutions | Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, Oxford. |
Thesis | Electronic spectra of simple molecules (1964) |
Doctoral advisor | Richard F. Barrow [2] |
Website | research |
(William) Graham Richards CBE FRS FLSW CChem HonFRSC (born 1 October 1939) is a chemist and Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. [3] He served as head of the department of chemistry at the University of Oxford from 1997 to 2006. [4]
Richards is a pioneer in the field of computer-aided molecular design, in particular its application to the pharmaceuticals industry. He was the founding scientist of Oxford Molecular Ltd., [5] and introduced a novel model for the funding of research at Oxford University, which has been copied elsewhere. [6] [7] Richards was one of the scientific co-founders of Oxford Molecular Limited (OMG). The company developed software for modelling of small molecules and proteins, and drug design. Benefiting from the economic and legal changes, the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1992, making the university £10 million. The company was worth £450 million at its peak but was eventually sold for £70 million. Richards has published more than 300 scientific papers, [8] including 15 books.
Graham Richards was born 1 October 1939 in Hoylake, England, to Percy and Gwendoline Julia (Evans) Richards. [9] [1] Both parents were of Welsh extraction. [1] Richards was educated at Birkenhead School. [10] Richards won a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, starting his studies there in 1958. [10] Richards received his bachelor's degree in Chemistry with first class honors from the University of Oxford [4] in 1961.[ citation needed ] Richards then studied the electronic spectroscopy of diatomic molecules with Richard F. Barrow, [4] earning his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy [2] degrees from the University of Oxford in 1964.[ citation needed ]
After his DPhil, he continued his spectroscopic work with fellowships in Oxford (ICI Research Fellowship, Junior Research Fellowship at Balliol College) and Paris, France (Centre de Mécanique Ondulatoire Appliquée). [11]
Graham Richards soon returned to Oxford as a research fellow at Balliol College, Oxford (1964–1966). He was promoted to a lecturer at Oxford University (1966–1994), to reader (1994–1996), and to professor (1996–2007). He served as chairman of the chemistry department from 1997 to 2006. [4] Richards celebrated his formal retirement from the University of Oxford on 18 May 2007. [12] He is now[ when? ] an Emeritus fellow of Brasenose College. [3]
In the fourth year of his degree course Richard's research project led him to using Oxford's Ferranti Mercury computer to solve integrals. [1] During a fellowship year in France at Centre de Mécanique Ondulatoire Appliquée, he was able to use more powerful computers. [13] Returning to Oxford, he worked on ab initio computations and applied computational techniques to solving quantum mechanical problems in theoretical chemistry, in particular studying spin-orbit coupling. [5] His influential paper Third age of quantum chemistry (1979) marked the development of computational techniques for theoretical analysis whose precision equaled or surpassed experimental results. [14] [15] [16]
"The work represents perhaps a near perfect instance of theory being in harmony with experiment, each aspect vital to the other and the combination much more than the sum of the separate parts"– Graham Richards [16] [14]
Richards saw the potential to apply computer techniques for examining the structure and properties of compounds in the area of pharmaceutical applications. He became a pioneer in the field of computer-aided molecular design. He was the first to produce coloured images modelling molecular structure graphically, [1] and introduced many of the techniques now widely used in academia and industry. [5]
In 1982, Richards became a founding member of the Molecular Graphics Society (now the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society, MGMS). [17] The society started the Journal of Molecular Graphics in 1983. Richards served as the editor-in-chief of the journal from 1984 to 1996. The journal's name changed to Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling in 1997. [18]
In 1989 Richards was the scientific co-founder (with Tony Marchington, David Ricketts, James Hiddleston, and Anthony Rees) of Oxford Molecular Limited. The company developed software for modelling of small molecules and proteins, and drug design. [19] The company was possible in part because of economic and legal changes under the government of Margaret Thatcher that enabled British universities to become involved with venture capital and technology transfer. As Oxford Molecular Group, Ltd. (OMG) the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1992, making the university £10 million. The company was worth £450 million at its peak but was eventually sold for £70 million. [1] [20] It was one of several companies that combined to form Accelrys in 2001. [21]
Richards was instrumental in raising £64 million to fund a new laboratory for Oxford University through an innovative funding approach. £20 million worth of funding began with an "unusual collaboration" between Graham and David Norwood. [6] Norwood then arranged for Beeson-Gregory to provide £20 million in exchange for half the University's equity share of any spin-out companies emanating from the Chemistry Department for 15 years. In 2003, Beeson-Gregory and Evolution Group merged, later creating a subsidiary, IP2IPO ("Intellectual property to initial public offering". [6] [22] Graham Richards became a non-executive director of IP2IPO in 2001, and non-executive chairman of IP2IPO in 2004. [20]
Through this arrangement the Chemistry Department has contributed over £100 million to the University of Oxford. [10] Richards served as a director of ISIS Innovation Ltd., the University of Oxford's technology transfer company. [8] It became Oxford University Innovation as of June 2016. [23] It has brought around 60 spin-out companies into existence. [1] The Financial Times has described the approach as "the way universities should be financed in the future". [22] : 188
Richards also introduced the use of distributed computing in pharmaceutical design. Started in 2000, his Screensaver Lifesaver project exploited idle time on more than 3.5 million personal computers in over 200 countries, whose owners agreed to be involved and downloaded the project's screensaver. Using idle time from these computers, the project's software created a virtual supercomputer that screened billions of compounds against protein targets, searching for possible drug treatments for cancer, anthrax and smallpox. [5] [24] [25] The project involved collaboration between Intel, United Devices, and the Centre for Computational Drug Discovery at the University of Oxford, [26] headed by Richards [8] and funded by the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR). [26]
Graham formed the spin-out company InhibOx Ltd. in 2001. [27] [10] InhibOx applied cloud computing techniques to computational chemistry and drug discovery, and developed a searchable database of small-molecules called Scopius. [28] In 2002, Richards donated his shares, twenty-five per cent of the company, to the National Foundation for Cancer Research. [29] [24] In 2017, InhibOx relaunched as Oxford Drug Design Ltd., [30] with a new focus on antibiotic discovery. [27]
As of 2011 [update] Richards joined the Science Advisory Panel of Oxford Medical Diagnostics. [8] Richards is a non-executive director of IP Group plc, having also served as its chairman. [5] [31]
Richards is a council member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and of The Royal Institution, a Fellow of the Royal Society, [5] and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).[ when? ] The Times Higher Education Supplement (2006) considered Richards to be one of twelve academic "super-earners" in the United Kingdom. [1] [33] Times magazine's first Eureka issue (2010) included Richards in its list of the top 100 British scientists. [34] Richards' work has been acknowledged through a number of more formal awards and honours, including the following:
Richards was married to his first wife, Jessamy Kershaw on 12 December 1970. She died of cancer in November 1988. As of 5 October 1996, Richards married Mary Elizabeth Phillips, director of research planning at University College London. He has two sons and three stepchildren. [1]
Computational chemistry is a branch of chemistry that uses computer simulation to assist in solving chemical problems. It uses methods of theoretical chemistry, incorporated into computer programs, to calculate the structures and properties of molecules, groups of molecules, and solids. The importance of this subject stems from the fact that, with the exception of some relatively recent findings related to the hydrogen molecular ion, achieving an accurate quantum mechanical depiction of chemical systems analytically, or in a closed form, is not feasible. The complexity inherent in many-body problem exacerbates the challenge of providing detailed descriptions in quantum mechanical systems. While computational results normally complement the information obtained by chemical experiments, it can in some cases predict unobserved chemical phenomena.
Sir John Anthony Pople was a British theoretical chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Kohn in 1998 for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.
Cheminformatics refers to the use of physical chemistry theory with computer and information science techniques—so called "in silico" techniques—in application to a range of descriptive and prescriptive problems in the field of chemistry, including in its applications to biology and related molecular fields. Such in silico techniques are used, for example, by pharmaceutical companies and in academic settings to aid and inform the process of drug discovery, for instance in the design of well-defined combinatorial libraries of synthetic compounds, or to assist in structure-based drug design. The methods can also be used in chemical and allied industries, and such fields as environmental science and pharmacology, where chemical processes are involved or studied.
grid.org was a website and online community established in 2001 for cluster computing and grid computing software users. For six years it operated several different volunteer computing projects that allowed members to donate their spare computer cycles to worthwhile causes. In 2007, it became a community for open source cluster and grid computing software. After around 2010 it redirected to other sites.
In biology and other experimental sciences, an in silico experiment is one performed on computer or via computer simulation. The phrase is pseudo-Latin for 'in silicon', referring to silicon in computer chips. It was coined in 1987 as an allusion to the Latin phrases in vivo, in vitro, and in situ, which are commonly used in biology. The latter phrases refer, respectively, to experiments done in living organisms, outside living organisms, and where they are found in nature.
Henry Frederick "Fritz" Schaefer III is a computational and theoretical chemist. He is one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, with a Thomson Reuters H-Index of 121 as of 2020. He is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia. Before becoming professor at Georgia he was professor at University of California, Berkeley and in 2004, he became Professor of Chemistry Emeritus, at UC Berkeley
MDL Information Systems, Inc. was a provider of R&D informatics products for the life sciences and chemicals industries. The company was launched as a computer-aided drug design firm in January 1978 in Hayward, California. The company was acquired by Symyx Technologies, Inc. in 2007. Subsequently Accelrys merged with Symyx. The Accelrys name was retained for the combined company. In 2014 Accelrys was acquired by Dassault Systemes. The Accelrys business unit was renamed BIOVIA.
Frederic Middlebrook Richards, commonly referred to as Fred Richards, was an American biochemist and biophysicist known for solving the pioneering crystal structure of the ribonuclease S enzyme in 1967 and for defining the concept of solvent-accessible surface. He contributed many key experimental and theoretical results and developed new methods, garnering over 20,000 journal citations in several quite distinct research areas. In addition to the protein crystallography and biochemistry of ribonuclease S, these included solvent accessibility and internal packing of proteins, the first side-chain rotamer library, high-pressure crystallography, new types of chemical tags such as biotin/avidin, the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shift index, and structural and biophysical characterization of the effects of mutations.
BIOVIA is a software company headquartered in the United States, with representation in Europe and Asia. It provides software for chemical, materials and bioscience research for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, consumer packaged goods, aerospace, energy and chemical industries.
Chemical Computing Group is a software company specializing in research software for computational chemistry, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, docking, pharmacophore searching and molecular simulation. The company's main customer base consists of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as academic research groups. It is a private company that was founded in 1994; it is based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Its main product, Molecular Operating Environment (MOE), is written in a self-contained programming system, the Scientific Vector Language (SVL).
Materials Studio is software for simulating and modeling materials. It is developed and distributed by BIOVIA, a firm specializing in research software for computational chemistry, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, molecular dynamics simulation, and quantum mechanics.
The Presidential Young Investigator Award(PYI) was awarded by the National Science Foundation of the United States Federal Government. The program operated from 1984 to 1991, and was replaced by the NSF Young Investigator (NYI) Awards and Presidential Faculty Fellows (PFF) program. In 1995, the NSF Young Investigator program was subsumed into the NSF CAREER Awards program, and in 1996, the Presidential Faculty Fellows program was replaced by the PECASE program.
Garikapati Narahari Sastry is an Indian chemist. He has taken charge as Director of CSIR-North East Institute of Science and Technology, Jorhat, Assam on 19 February 2019. After taking charge as the Director, he has worked towards converting knowledge in the areas of computational modelling and Artificial intelligence from basic to translational research, by working closely with society and industry. Ultimately, revitalizing the strength of science and technology is essential in achieving the self-reliant and strong India. In the era of Industry 4.0 and 5.0, combining our traditional wisdom with modern science appear to be indispensable in the sectors such as Education, Health, Agriculture, Industrial and Societal development at large. Prior to joining as the Director, he headed the Molecular Modelling Division at the CSIR Indian Institute of Chemical Technology in Hyderabad, India. Sastry has made pioneering contributions in the areas of computational chemistry and computational biology.
Laurence Harris Pearl FRS FMedSci is a British biochemist and structural biologist who is currently Professor of Structural Biology in the Genome Damage and Stability Centre and was Head of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex.
Donald Gene Truhlar is an American scientist working in theoretical and computational chemistry and chemical physics with special emphases on quantum mechanics and chemical dynamics.
Ruth Nussinov is an Israeli-American biologist born in Rehovot who works as a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and is the Senior Principal Scientist and Principal Investigator at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. Nussinov is also the Editor in Chief of the Current Opinion in Structural Biology and formerly of the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
Klaus Schulten was a German-American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schulten used supercomputing techniques to apply theoretical physics to the fields of biomedicine and bioengineering and dynamically model living systems. His mathematical, theoretical, and technological innovations led to key discoveries about the motion of biological cells, sensory processes in vision, animal navigation, light energy harvesting in photosynthesis, and learning in neural networks.
Yvonne Connolly Martin is an American cheminformatics and computer-aided drug design expert who rose to the rank of Senior Volwiler Research Fellow at Abbott Laboratories. Trained in chemistry at Northwestern University, she became a leader in collaborative science aimed at discovering and developing bioactive molecules as therapeutic agents, with her contributions proceeding from application of methods to understand how descriptors of molecular shapes and physicochemical properties relate to their biological activity. She is the author of a seminal volume in cheminformatics, Quantitative Drug Design, and has been the recipient of numerous awards in her field, including being named as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1985) and of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (2000), and receiving the Herman Skolnik Award (2009) and the Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research (2017) from the American Chemical Society.
Molecular Operating Environment (MOE) is a drug discovery software platform that integrates visualization, modeling and simulations, as well as methodology development, in one package. MOE scientific applications are used by biologists, medicinal chemists and computational chemists in pharmaceutical, biotechnology and academic research. MOE runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Main application areas in MOE include structure-based design, fragment-based design, ligand-based design, pharmacophore discovery, medicinal chemistry applications, biologics applications, structural biology and bioinformatics, protein and antibody modeling, molecular modeling and simulations, virtual screening, cheminformatics & QSAR. The Scientific Vector Language (SVL) is the built-in command, scripting and application development language of MOE.
Carmen Domene is a Spanish academic who is a professor of chemistry at the University of Bath. Her research makes use of computational simulations to understand biological systems and processes. She was awarded the 2020 International Society of Quantum Biology and Pharmacology Loew Award and the 2023 Royal Society of Chemistry Corday-Morgan Prize.