Stormy Weather
First off, I need to introduce myself. I am the newest member of the CCDC team and its Business Director. You can see the formal stuff in my biography here, and on LinkedIn. Here’s a bit of colour: I’m a Brit who studied in Oxford and (what was then West) Berlin, I’m married to an American and we split our time between the UK and New Jersey. I’ve been involved in all aspects of computational chemistry for the best part of thirty years – and I enjoy it. So CCDC is very much a natural home for me.
As we have seen, tragically, with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey this week, change is often neither gradual nor orderly. The boardwalks and piers on which our kids played so happily in July are now largely gone. Everyone at CCDC sends out their best wishes for the future to those on the East Coast affected by the storm.
What has been a constant in the world of computational chemistry is that CCDC has been providing uniquely valuable data to support research scientists in thousands of organizations around the world. CCDC has served chemists for the last five decades and is well set for the future. But the world in which the CCDC data is applied is undergoing constant and sometimes abrupt change.
We have seen pharmaceutical enterprises restructure their research operations profoundly in the last few years, establishing new collaboration networks with biotechs, CROs, academic groups and even their competitors. We have also seen the wide scale adoption of cloud computing and data sharing technologies which have enabled exciting new computational chemistry capabilities in new areas of life sciences and materials research.
Data underpin all of the new applications on all the new platforms, in all the new organisations. And all that we know for certain is that all of these will continue to depend critically on the availability of high quality, validated, curated experimental and derived data.
CCDC will remain constant in its provision of high quality data and expertise, but the organisation itself will continue to evolve its delivery as the world of computational chemistry changes. You will see more of us, as we build closer ties with our international user communities, and I look forward to speaking with as many of you as I can in the months ahead about how you work with us. Please feel free to contact to discuss any aspect of your relationship with CCDC.
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