Lecture
Open Science, societal demand for access to scientific knowledge

Annual NUTRIM Symposium 18 November 2020

Biography Egon Willighagen
Egon Willighagen studied chemistry and cheminformatics at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands with a minor in organic chemistry (lipid aggregation) and a major data analysis of chemical data. He obtained her PhD at the same university in the field of chemometrics in the Analytical Chemistry group of prof. Lutgarde Buydens. This was followed by various research positions at Cologne University, Wageningen University, Uppsala University, University of Cambridge, Karolinska Institutet, and Maastricht University, with research in the fields of drug discovery, metabolomics, and toxicology. He is now a team leader at the Dept of Bioinformatics at Maastricht University, and participates as PI in various international projects, with a total funding of >2 mEuro in the past 6 years.

His research basically focuses on the question on how to capture chemical and biological knowledge to enable machine learning. He takes advantage of his education in the fields of analytical and organic chemistry. A secondary objective is to enable open science approaches, and learning requires data and knowledge to learn from. 

Dr Willighagen is recognized for his open science and his cheminformatics work, advises in various projects, has been involved in many Open Science projects, such as the Chemistry Development Kit, Jmol, and WikiPathways, is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cheminformatics (one of two), is chair of the Data Management working group of the EU NanoSafety Cluster, and founding member of the GO FAIR Chemistry Implementation Network. 

Three selected publications: 
● Steinbeck C, Han Y, Kuhn S, Horlacher O, Luttmann E, Willighagen E. The Chemistry Development Kit (CDK): An Open-Source Java Library for Chemo- and Bioinformatics. Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences. 2003 Mar;43(2):493–500.  
● Slenter DN, Kutmon M, Hanspers K, Riutta A, Windsor J, Nunes N, et al. WikiPathways: a multifaceted pathway database bridging metabolomics to other omics research. Nucleic Acids Research. 2018 Jan 4;46(D1):D661–D667.  
● Guha R, Howard MT, Hutchison GR, Murray-Rust P, Rzepa H, Steinbeck C, et al. The Blue Obelisk-Interoperability in Chemical Informatics. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. 2006 May;46(3):991–8. 


NUTRIM | School of Nutrition and Translational Research in Metabolism
NUTRIM aims to contribute to health maintenance and personalised medicine by unraveling lifestyle and disease-induced derangements in metabolism and by developing targeted nutritional, exercise and drug interventions. This is facilitated by a state of the art research infrastructure and close interaction between scientists, clinicians, master and PhD students.
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