Chemoinformatics: The Michael Lynch Research Lab
The Computational Information Systems Research Group is located in a newly refurbished laboratory on the third floor of Regent's Court. Funding for the lab refurbishment was provided by the Royal Society and the Wolfson Foundation and the lab was named in honour of Professor Michael Lynch, a former head of the department and pioneer in the field of chemical information.
The lab is fully air-conditioned and can accommodate up to 20 researchers. The lab is equipped to a high standard with high performance PCs and a cluster of Linux and Silicon Graphics workstations.
The opening ceremony, in December 1999, was attended by Professor Lynch, Sir Eric Ash (Treasurer of the Royal Society), Sir Gareth Roberts (Vice Chancellor of Sheffield University), and members of the department and the research group. The lab was opened by Professor Lynch, a brief biography of whom is given below.
Michael F. Lynch
BSc, PhD (NUI), CChem, FIInfSc
Prof. Michael F. Lynch was awarded B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry by the National University of Ireland in 1954 and 1957, respectively, and followed this with post-doctoral research at the Swiss Federal Institute. Following two years in industry in the UK, he joined the staff of Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) in Columbus, Ohio in 1961, where he eventually became the head of the Basic Research Department. At this time CAS were carrying out some of the earliest large-scale experiments on the use of computers for the production of both textual and chemical databases, and these two related areas formed the basis for Mike´s subsequent research career. In 1965, he came to the University of Sheffield to take up a post at what was then the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, where he was awarded a Personal Chair in 1975.
Mike´s initial research work in Sheffield focused on the development of automatic methods for the production of articulated subject indices, and for indexing, storing and retrieving chemical reactions. The latter proved to be an extremely refractory area, and work continued on it for over a decade before an efficient and effective graph matching procedure was identified that, with further development, formed the basis for the many public and in-house reaction retrieval systems that are now available.
The late Sixties saw the start of research into the selection of fragment screens for chemical substructure searching, the statistical independence of screen assignments, and the relationship between query and structure characteristics inter alia. This work provided the theoretical basis for many modern chemical substructure search systems. The chemical screening techniques were subsequently applied to the identification and processing of character substrings in textual databases.
The principal focus of interest in the second half of Mike´s career was the storage and retrieval of generic structures, the partially defined molecules that occur in chemical patents. This pioneering work, which spanned some fifteen years, resulted in an input language and a machine-readable representation for the formal and explicit description of generic structures, algorithmic procedures for the assignment of fragments to generic structures, and a range of retrieval mechanisms to allow searching of files of generic structures. The need to encompass both the chemical and the textual components of chemical patents led to an interest in methods for information extraction from natural language patent descriptions.
During his time at Sheffield, he also made substantial contributions to the teaching within the Department. In particular, he was in large part responsible for the very substantial part that computing has always played in the Department´s taught Masters´ programmes. Mike´s reputation meant that he was much in demand as a speaker both in this country and abroad. Visits included lecture tours to China, India, Iraq and Poland and he participated in a series of highly influential summer schools in information work that were organised by UNESCO and by the British Council. His achievements were widely recognised. In 1977, he was awarded the prize for the best paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and in 1980, he received the annual Award of the Institute of Information Scientists in recognition of his services to information science. In 1989, he received the Skolnick Award of the American Chemical Society, which is made annually to recognize outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of chemical information science. Despite this body of work, he was always able to find time to talk with students about their work and to chat with them on an informal basis: indeed, this friendliness is likely to be one of the main memories of the hundreds of students that he taught in the Department before he retired in 1997.