Online Chemistry Nexus Proposal/People

The people below have agreed to participate in the grant proposal in some capacity.

Participants

Principal investigator

• Martin A. Walker, organic chemistry professor at SUNY Potsdam and Wikipedian.

Co-PIs/Senior personnel

• Nigel Wheatley, a PhD chemist and Wikipedian based in Europe, who works as a consultant.
• Antony Williams, founder of ChemSpider, now VP Strategic Development ChemSpider, Royal Society of Chemistry.
• Jean-Claude Bradley, organic chemistry professor at Drexel University, blogger and pioneer of Open Notebook Science.
• Andrew Lang, mathematics professor at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, OK, also involved in Open Notebook Science work.
• Beth Brown, librarian at the SUNY Binghamton Science Library, an expert in scholarly communication and open access. See her recent presentation from the ACS Spring '09 meeting.

Potsdam grants officers

Staff all work for the Research and Sponsored Programs Office, part of the SUNY Research Foundation which covers all 64 campuses within New York State.

• Kathy Chapman is the main grants officer, she brings many years of experience in administering and preparing grant proposals.
• Regan DeFranza is a grant-writer, involved in writing and copyediting the manuscript.

Advisory group

In alphabetical order, with areas of expertise highlighted.

• Daniel Mayer, a very experienced Wikipedian with a background in biology and geology, he also wrote much of the content in the Wikipedia chemical element articles.
• Harry Pence, Distinguished Teaching Professor in chemistry at SUNY Oneonta, expert in chemical education and longtime advocate of technology in the lecture hall.
• Jana Penders, former high school biology & chemistry teacher, currently a research associate at SUNY Brockport in the earth sciences department.
• Alex Tropsha, professor and chair of the School of Pharmacy at UNC-Chapel Hill, internationally renowned in bioinformatics and rational drug design.
• Bethany Usher, professor of biological anthropology at SUNY Potsdam, and director of the Center for Undergraduate Research.
• Bill Wedemeyer, professor of molecular biology at Michigan State University. Works on computational and experimental methods to study protein structure, and active on Wikipedia as User:Proteins.
• Andrew Yeung, Research Assistant, Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore. Experienced in Wikipedia, and working with N-heterocyclic carbenes.

A broader appeal

The NSF program officer is keen that Wikichem should appeal to a broad range of scientists, not just "hard core" chemists:

"Based on the limited information below, it appears that this project is within the scope of STCI if you can explain how it supports multiple science domains (perhaps within chemistry or perhaps how it can be expanded more broadly as part of the project. STCI is meant to be a very broad-reaching program, and should support a broad user base. I’d recommend being sure to emphasize the wide-ranging applicability of the work and to identify current and prospective end users as these are some of the additional criteria STCI proposals are evaluated on."

This is why we have attempted to assemble an advisory group that represents a very diverse set of interests.