Our webinars will showcase current and planned initiatives to develop standards and tools, research infrastructures, and developing cultures to support FAIR chemistry data preparation, publication, and reuse, and explore what’s needed to evolve a better future using chemistry data. Our speakers represent the wider chemistry community, with representatives from academia, industry, as well as national and international initiatives.
Webinar 1: Where to begin with AI and ML? – watch the recording
Tuesday April 14th 2026, 3 pm (BST)
Speakers
- Nessa Carson, Digital Champion, AstraZeneca, UK – SLIDES
- Raquel López-Ríos de Castro, Postdoctoral Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany – SLIDES
Click here to find out more about this webinar.
Webinar 2: Data storage and management – watch the recording
Tuesday May 19th 2026, 3 pm (BST)
Speakers
- Nongnuch Artrith, Assistant Professor, Utrecht University, Netherlands – SLIDES
- Nicole Jung, Project Leader, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany – SLIDES
- Benjamin Deadman, Program Manager, Open Reaction Database, UK – SLIDES
Click here to find out more about this webinar.
Webinar 3: Chemical standards and representation – register for free
Tuesday June 23rd 2026, 3 pm (BST)
Speakers
- J. Christian Baber, Chief Portfolio Officer, The Pistoia Alliance, UK
Click here to find out more about this webinar.
About ChemSpider
Explore more than 138 million structures on the ChemSpider database. Including over 200 data sources, ChemSpider is a valuable source of information for chemical scientists working with data.
Freely accessible and comprehensive, this rich source of structure-based chemistry information is a fundamental resource for chemical scientists working with data everywhere.
Christian Baber is a chemist by training and holds undergraduate and PhD degrees in computational chemistry with a focus on AI techniques to assess the synthetic accessibility of de novo design compounds. Christian continued this work with a post-doctoral fellowship on the automated design of targeted combinatorial libraries at the Department of Knowledge Engineering, Osaka University, Japan before moving into industry initially as a computational chemist and cheminformatician. Christian has a wide breadth of R&D experience across companies ranging from startups to large pharma with a focus on informatics and predictive modeling for drug discovery but has also managed development systems and lab & automation teams including compound management and high-throughput purification. As Chief Portfolio Officer of the Pistoia Alliance, he is responsible for all of the projects, communities and training run under the umbrella of the Alliance from the initial idea, through execution, to delivery of artifacts and sustainability of products.
Nicole Jung is
Dr. 
Nessa Carson received Master’s degrees in synthesis and catalysis from Oxford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She started out as a synthetic chemist for AMRI, then moved within the company to run the high-throughput automation facility for Eli Lilly in Windlesham, working across discovery and process chemistry, then in high-throughput reaction optimization at Pfizer and then Syngenta. Nessa moved to AstraZeneca in 2022 as Digital Champion, focussing on digital transformation and making life easier for scientists, and currently works in the Predictive Science, Digital, and Automation team. She was awarded the Salters’ Institute Centenary Award for early-career chemists with the potential to make an outstanding long-term contribution to industrial chemistry.
Raquel López-Ríos de Castro
Revvity Signals Software delivers AI-enhanced solutions to accelerate R&D workflows and enable data-driven innovation. Trusted by pharma and biotech, our portfolio includes ChemDraw®, Signals Notebook, Signals One, Signals Synergy, Signals Clinical, and Spotfire®, empowering scientists with predictive analytics, seamless collaboration, and interactive visualizations for groundbreaking discoveries.
Dr. Oliver Koepler is head of the Lab Linked Scientific Knowledge at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, where he leads research and developments at the intersection of chemistry, data science, and knowledge engineering. Since 2005, he has been instrumental in transforming chemical research through digital innovation, developing e-infrastructures and research data management services that support scientists throughout the entire data lifecycle. He is a spokesperson of NFDI4Chem which has developed innovative tools like the SmartLab environment with Chemotion electronic lab notebook, the federation of Data repositories, the Terminology and Search Service that promote FAIR data principles across the chemistry community.
Jonathan Hirst is Professor in Computational Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. In 2020, he was awarded a Chair in Emerging Technologies by the Royal Academy of Engineering, focusing on research that will empower the development of next-generation molecules that chemical engineers and chemists make, by using machine learning to augment human decision-making. His tenure as Head of School (2013-2017) saw some significant transformations under his leadership, including the building of the GSK Carbon Neutral Laboratory and a successful bid for an Athena Swan Silver Award.
Nicolas 
Wendy Patterson is a member of the Board of Management of the Beilstein-Institut where she serves as Scientific Director. She is also a board member of Crossref and the InChI Trust, in addition to other non-profit organizations serving the community. The Beilstein-Institut supports the scientific community in communicating and disseminating high-quality information in chemistry and related sciences through open science practices. In addition, they support the scientific community by funding educational and cultural projects. The Beilstein-Institut recently established the Beilstein ChemInfo Labs, a project area supporting community-led digital infrastructure and standards projects in chemistry.
Dr. Jacob Al-Saleem, a Data Science Manager at CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, leads a team working to develop novel bioinformatic solutions using artificial intelligence to extract and connect scientific knowledge. He led the data science efforts for a team that developed a heterogeneous knowledge graph-based approach to identify repositionable therapeutics for COVID-19. His knowledge graph work is the foundation for the Life Sciences Knowledge Graph that is featured in CAS BioFinder. Dr. Al-Saleem earned his B.S. in Molecular Genetics and Ph.D. in Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology from The Ohio State University, where his work focused on the molecular virology of Human T cell Leukemia Viruses.
Birgit (Bea) Braun, Ph.D., is an R&D/TS&D Fellow for Digital Innovation in the Packaging, Specialty Plastics & Hydrocarbons R&D organization at Dow. She has held diverse roles across R&D and M&E, and for more than a decade, Bea has focused on applying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to chemical manufacturing and materials research. She has led the development and deployment of numerous data science solutions across Dow, and today her work centers on unlocking value through holistic digital transformation. Bea earned a Dipl.-Ing. in Process Engineering with a specialization in Industrial Environmental Protection from Montanuniversität Leoben in Austria, she holds an M.S. in Environmental Science & Engineering and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.
Garrison W. (Gary) Cottrell is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. He co-founded the Perceptual Expertise Network, and directed the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, an NSF-sponsored Science of Learning Center spread across four countries. Gary’s research is strongly interdisciplinary. He is interested in Cognitive Science and Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and in applying AI to problems in other areas of science or engineering. Most recently he has been using deep learning to elucidate the structure of small (natural product) molecules from their NMR spectra in collaboration with Bill Gerwick at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. He received his PhD in 1985 from the University of Rochester and did a postdoc at the Institute of Cognitive Science at UCSD until 1987, when he joined the CSE Department.