ChemSpider hosts regular free, data-themed webinars. These evolve around how data is enabling and embedded in chemical research, educating the community about existing models and tools, as well as addressing challenges and discussing solutions for better chemistry data management. Our sessions encourage chemists across all sectors and career stages to embrace better digital data practices.
Webinar 4: AI & tools in chemistry – register for free
Tuesday 22 September 2026, 3 pm (BST)
Speakers
- Ewa Gajewska, Head of Product Management, Merck KGaA, Germany
- Alan Kenwright, SimpleNMR, UK
Click here to find out more about this webinar.
Webinar 5: Empowering data management – register for free
Tuesday 20 October 2026, 3 pm (BST)
Speakers
- Samantha Kanza, Senior Enterprise Fellow, University of Southampton, UK
- Monique Roerdink Lander, JMP
- Wendy Tseng, JMP
Click here to find out more about this webinar.
Webinar 6: Data reuse – register for free
Tuesday 17 November 2026, 3 pm (GMT)
Speakers
- Kathryn Cowtan, Professor of Chemistry, University of York, UK
Click here to find out more about this webinar.
Sponsored by
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) provides a secure, intuitive, web-based software suite that helps research scientists organize and analyse their data. Biologists and chemists use CDD Vault to register entities, manage inventory, record experiments, and evaluate structure–activity relationships. CDD Vault also standardizes and structures data, making it easier to leverage the latest advances in AI and machine learning capabilities. CDD recently released the CDD Vault Connector for Claude Desktop, unlocking new possibilities for AI-powered workflows. Founded in 2004, CDD supports thousands of researchers worldwide across academic, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical organizations. Learn more at www.collaborativedrug.com
SAS created JMP in 1989 to empower scientists and engineers to explore data visually. Since then, JMP has grown from a single product into a family of statistical discovery tools, each one tailored to meet specific needs. All of our software is visual, interactive, comprehensive and extensible.
JMP is the data analysis tool of choice for hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers and other data explorers worldwide. Users leverage powerful statistical and analytic capabilities in JMP to discover the unexpected.
Merck KGaA Darmstadt Germany is a leading science and technology company with a broad portfolio across life science, healthcare, and electronics. Through SYNTHIA® Retrosynthesis Software, Merck helps chemists accelerate route design, explore novel synthetic pathways, and make more informed decisions in chemical research. Expert-coded by chemists and engineered by computer scientists, SYNTHIA® supports faster, smarter, and more efficient synthesis planning for both new and published target molecules.
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.
Kathryn is an interdisciplinary data scientist working at York Structural Biology Laboratory. She developed software for key steps in the solution of molecular structures from X-ray crystallography data and cryo-electron microscopy. In the last decade Kathryn has also become interested in data analysis problems in climate science. In addition to working with the UK Met Office and other organizations on historical observations and climate model outputs, she has also worked with psychologists and social scientists on understanding and responding to the motivated rejection of climate science. Recently Kathryn has developed a postgraduate taught programme in data science with major emphasis on reducing barriers to participation, especially in the areas of gender and neurodiversity.
Dr. Ewa Gajewska is the Head of Product Management at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, where she leads the development of SYNTHIA® Retrosynthesis Software – a groundbreaking software for computer-assisted synthetic planning. She graduated in biotechnology and chemistry from the Gdansk University of Technology and was a recipient of the Outstanding Achievements Award from Poland’s Minister of Science and Higher Education. In 2020 she received her PhD from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her passion for tackling complex scientific challenges within commercial settings and the unique blend of her interdisciplinary skills drive the realization of innovative features of SYNTHIA® Retrosynthesis Software.
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.
Jonathan Goodman studied boron-mediated 
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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