Peter Willett is an Emeritus Professor of

Information Science Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, Categorization, classification, manipulation, storage, information retrieval, retrieval, movement, dissemin ...

at the

University of Sheffield , mottoeng = To discover the causes of things , established = – University of SheffieldPredecessor institutions: – Sheffield Medical School – Firth College – Sheffield Technical School – University College of Sheffield , type = Pu ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

Life and education

Willett was born 20 April 1953, obtained an Honors degree in

Chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

from

Exeter College, Oxford Exeter College (in full: The Rector and Scholars of Exeter College in the University of Oxford) is one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England and the fourth-oldest college of the un ...

in 1975 and then went to the Department of Information Studies,

where he obtained an MSc in Information Studies in 1976. He obtained a PhD in the same department in 1979. Willett's publication list

Career

His entire career has been in the

Information School An information school (sometimes abbreviated I-school or iSchool) is a university-level institution committed to understanding the role of information in nature and human endeavors. Synonyms include school of information, department of informati ...

, where he heads a research group studying computational techniques for the processing of chemical and biological information, and has over 480 publications describing this work. Measured in 2020, he had an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as winn ...

of 86.

Work

Willett is best known for his contribution to

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...

and

cheminformatics Cheminformatics (also known as chemoinformatics) refers to use of physical chemistry theory with computer and information science techniques—so called "''in silico''" techniques—in application to a range of descriptive and prescriptive problem ...

Honours

He was the recipient of the 1993 Herman Skolnik Award of the American Chemical Society,
List of Skolnik award winners of the 1997 Distinguished Lecturer Award of the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society for Information Science, of the 2001

Tony Kent Strix award Tony may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tony (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters * Gregory Tony (born 1978), American law enforcement officer * Motu Tony (born 1981), New Zealand international rugby leagu ...

of the Institute of Information Scientists,
List of Strix award winners of the 2002 Lynch Award of the CSA Trust, Chemical Structure Association Trust
CSA Trust awards page and of the 2005 Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research of the

American Chemical Society The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all d ...

(ACS)
ACS 2005 awards page Willett was only the 2nd non-US recipient of the ACS award, which was given "''for his diverse contributions to the fields of chemoinformatics and computer-assisted molecular discovery; his novel algorithms and software; and his contributions to the literatures of those fields''". He was awarded a DSc by the University of Sheffield in 1997.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Willett, Peter Academics of the University of Sheffield Living people 1953 births