Cancer researchers get scholarship

With their research attempting to cure cancer and make advancements in the medical world, Huijun Wang and Xiao Dong have earned the American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Information-MDL Elsevier Scholarship, which will be awarded to them this weekend at the society’s national meeting.\nWith technology constantly changing and advancing, the need for quicker ways to research vast amounts of information in pharmaceutical drug discovery projects increases every day. Chemical informatics provides new or better methods to organize and analyze all data needed for chemical research accessed through computer technology.\nWang and Dong’s research is aimed at using some highly advanced techniques on the Web and data mining to help scientists understand the information in order to make faster and better decisions; thereby, proving to be significant in the scientific world. \n“This is helping establish ourselves as a main player in that field. This is part of being recognized as world leaders in the industry of chemical informatics,” said David Wild, assistant professor in the School of Informatics.\nThe CINF Elsevier Scholarship award was established in 2002 by the American Chemical Society. It aims to improve the way information is gained and used in the scientific world by awarding money each year to deserving graduate students going into their second years and working in chemical or bioinformatics. \nDong, who also received this award during fall 2006, said that he felt “quite honorable to win it back to back; to be recognized by the professional community in our research in chemical informatics.”\nDong, a second-year graduate student, previously received a Ph.D. in informatics. \nIn his work, Dong uses Web 2.0 and other intelligence-based systems like the Semantic Web, which links information to Web pages to round up data. The data interprets which chemical compounds can be used in pharmaceutical drugs without being harmful to the consumer and makes searching for this data much easier.\nOn the other hand, Wang, a first-year graduate student, researches the relations of chemical compounds that can possibly deter or get rid of cancer. \n“Knowledge is power to us,” Wang said. ”We try to find the connection between the compound structure and how it relates to cancer in the tumor cells. We eventually hope to build a data system we can use to cure cancer.”\nWang said she is excited to be a part of the select few who have been invited to accept the award Sunday in Chicago. The award has encouraged her to continue pursuing her work with chemical informatics. “I am very glad to receive the award. I will work even harder to get better results and data outputs in the future,” Wang said.