September 7, 2010
Rima Hajjo and Hao Tang, both graduate students in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products, were granted this year’s CINF-FIZ Scholarship for Scientific Excellence.
The German-American sponsored prize jointly awarded by FIZ CHEMIE and CINF, the Division of Chemical Information of the American Chemical Society, honors considerable contributions of graduate and postdoctoral students to the development of computer-supported chemical information sciences. The award is designed to advance computer-aided preparation and the use of chemical knowledge as well as to foster students’ involvement in CINF.
This year’s winners of the CINF-FIZ Scholarship for Scientific Excellence were announced during the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston. The winners presented their research work in a scientific poster session during the welcoming reception of the CINF on Sunday evening.
“I am very happy that two students from my lab captured two of the three awards given at the recent national meeting of the American Chemical Society in the area of chemical information sciences,” says Alex Tropsha, PhD, chair of the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products.
Hajjo’s poster was titled “A Chemocentric Informatics Approach to Drug Discovery: An Application to the Identification and Experimental Validation of Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators as Serotonin Receptor Subtype 6 Binders and Potential Anti-Alzheimer’s Agents”. Her work was supported by her colleagues and co-authors Simon Wang, PhD; Bryan Roth, PhD; and Tropsha.
Tang’s poster was titled “Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) Analysis of US EPA Toxicity Reference Database (ToxRefDB): Toxicity Models help Prioritizing Compounds for Future Toxicity Testing.” Her co-authors were Hao Zhu, PhD; Liying Zhang, Alexander Sedykh, PhD; Ann Richard, Ivan Rusyn, MD, PhD; and Tropsha.