A new job, a postdoc opportunity, an open biological curator role, and a user group meeting

Almost exactly 6 months ago, I took over the leadership of the Chemical Biology Services team at EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK. This is the team that looks after ChEMBL, ChEBI, SureChEMBL, UniChem and OPSIN (check out our webpage, blog and follow us on LinkedIn, Bluesky). I could say a lot more about the honour of being appointed to this role, the responsibility I feel to the community, how this is the dream job for a cheminformatician, but let's keep it short!

And you can join this team too! If you want to be part of improving these services for the community, then please get in touch regarding the ARISE2 postdoc call described on our blog. There are a lot of cool things that we could do.

And that's not the only opportunity. We have just opened a role for a biological data curator. This is a key role in terms of maintaining the quality of our data. Currently this work is not very visible to the community, and we want to change that, which is one of the reasons we want to build closer links with everyone via....

...the ChEMBL UGM (!), a user group meeting around our services. We now have a provisional date, 05-06 Mar 2025 (edit: 24-25 Feb 2026). You will be hearing more about this on our blog, likely in September. Apart from everything else you might expect from a UGM, this particular meeting at the start of my 9-year tenure will play a key role in influencing future development of our services. If you want to be informed when more information is available and registration opens, please email chembl-ugm@ebi.ac.uk.

A 16-year time loop

Next week I wlil be attending the Computer Aided Drug Design Gordon Research Conference (CADD GRC) in the US (Maine).

The last (and only) time I attended this meeting was 16 years ago. At that time I was a postdoc at the CCDC working on the GOLD docking software, and presented a poster "Why multiple scoring functions can improve docking performance". Right after my 5-minute flash presentation (see program), some random English guy presented his poster about a database with a funny name that was about to be released.

This was July 2009; three months later ChEMBL 01 would be released.

Even at the time, I recognised that this was a big deal. In academia, research was difficult if not impossible because of the lack of data. Meanwhile industry published research that used their internal data and couldn't be challenged, compared, or built upon. To quote a recent conversation with an industry figure, showing results on ChEMBL keeps everyone honest.

But as well as learning about ChEMBL, I got to know John Overington, who subsequently invited me to present on protein ligand docking and cheminformatics at various training courses he organised at the EBI, even after I moved back to Ireland. For me, this was a really great connection to have as it increased my profile, and I got to meet many of the leading figures in the field. In return, John got the occassional bug report emailed directly to his inbox which I'm sure was exactly what he wanted. :-) We've kept in touch over the years, and he has been a great help when I've needed it.

And so, I am returning to where it all started. Only this time I am the random English Irish guy with the poster about ChEMBL. And who knows, maybe I, in my turn, will meet a future custodian of ChEMBL...?