STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that Dr. Alexander "Sandy" Lawson, Director, Research & Development, Elsevier Information Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, will receive the prestigious Mike Lynch Award from the Chemical Structure Association (CSA) Trust. This honour is bestowed upon Prof. Lawson in recognition of 25 years of outstanding accomplishments in the field of cheminformatics, specifically relating to the development of the CrossFire Beilstein database and the origination of the CrossFire concept that is claimed to have revolutionised chemical information and reaction and structure searching.
The triennial CSA Trust Mike Lynch Award recognises and encourages outstanding accomplishments in education, research and development activities that are related to the systems and methods used to store, process and retrieve information about chemical structures, reactions and properties. The award will be presented to Prof. Lawson on June 1, 2008 during the International Conference on Chemical Structures.
One of the pioneers of cheminformatics, Prof. Lawson has played an instrumental role in shepherding the progress of CrossFire Beilstein as it moved into the electronic age - from its beginnings as the print Handbuch der Organischen Chemie (1881) to a powerful multimedia information system. Working in close collaboration with an innovative development team, some of Prof. Lawson's major achievements include the eponymous Lawson Number, a classification scheme based on the original Beilstein system numbers that offers an intelligent and rapid way to facilitate compound searching in an online environment; SANDRA (Search and Retrieval in Beilstein) algorithm for rapid searching; CrossFire search software with powerful functionality and extensive hyperlinking, which first enabled delivery of the massive Beilstein database directly to the desktop for seamless integration into chemists' daily workflow; and information extraction algorithms and automatic interpretation of chemical data leading to the creation of the Patent Chemistry Database.
Prof. Lawson and his team are currently working on Reaxys, which will deliver the deep chemistry knowledge contained within the CrossFire databases through an intuitive interface, making it easier for users to find and use information. This solution hopes to bring greater transparency and addressability to the user and focuses on contextual search, multistep reactions and identifying and visualising relationships between objects.
