Peter Willett is an Emeritus Professor of Information Science at the

University of Sheffield The University of Sheffield (informally Sheffield University or TUOS) is a public university, public research university in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Its history traces back to the foundation of Sheffield Medical School in 1828, Fir ...

, England.

Life and education

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

Chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

from

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

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 informat ...

, 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 success indicators such as winning t ...

of 86.

Work

Willett is best known for his contribution to

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

and

cheminformatics Cheminformatics (also known as chemoinformatics) refers to the 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 ...

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 The UKeiG Strix award is an annual award for outstanding contributions to the field of information retrieval and is presented in memory of Dr. Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists (IIS), who died in 1997. Tony Kent ma ...

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 ...

(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