Some Happy/Sad News


As regular followers of the ChEMBL-og or twitter will know, Ben Stauch had his viva voce and passed his thesis defence, and is now a fully fledged PhD graduate from the University of Cambridge. Ben hung around with us a little time after, working on a small fun project applying ChEMBL to compound/target selection. He is off fairly soon, so it's almost time to say goodbye and good luck to him. There's a few papers left from his predoc studies, so watch out for these as they appear.

He's now looking for jobs, and so if you are looking for someone who knows ChEMBL inside out, with a good background in NMR/X-ray, docking and simulation, stats and programming, he would be great employee! His LinkedIn profile is here if you want to get in touch with him.

'I am not a number, I am a free man', is not quite true for Ben, who is now actually a number - his ORCID is 0000-0001-7626-2021

It's also a pretty big milestone for me in my career - for over 20 years I worked in the commercial sector, so didn't supervise students, and Ben is the first I've helped get across the line. I really enjoy working with predocs - providing some coaching and support, encouraging independence, making introductions and assisting with networking, and most importantly in my view, trying to encourage a sense of wonder in discovery and knowing where the real challenges in the field are - avoiding the well-trod and over-explored paths. Our other students are also doing well - Felix has submitted, and Rita and Samuel are either writing up, or starting to write up. Oh, finally we have a new student, Jose, who will join us in January 2014.

Enough of this sentimental self-reflection! This post is here to provide a link to Ben's thesis - this will eventually appear on the EMBL library site, but it's here, now.

Good luck, thanks, and the very best of wishes the future Ben!