Christoph Steinbeck
Spokesperson
Friedrich Schiller University Jena
studied chemistry at the University of Bonn, where he received his diploma and doctoral degree at the Institute of Organic Chemistry. His doctoral thesis focused on computer-assisted structure elucidation of organic compounds. Realizing that his research was hampered by the lack of open spectroscopic data, he diverted into creating databases in chemistry and biology and becoming an evangelist of open data, open-source and open science.
It further led him to become head of cheminformatics and metabolism at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, Cambridge, UK. During this time, his group developed production-quality, open chemistry databases for the biosciences, such as ChEBI, the dictionary and ontology of Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, and the MetaboLights database, a repository and reference database for Metabolomics. Steinbeck gained experience in managing large infrastructure projects through leading the European e-infrastructure projects COSMOS (Coordination of Standards in Metabolomics) and PhenoMeNal (large scale computing with human metabolic phenotyping data). Today, Christoph Steinbeck is Professor for Analytical Chemistry, Cheminformatics, and Chemometrics at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany
Oliver Koepler
Spokesperson
Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology TIB Hannover
studied chemistry at the University of Kiel. After his diploma, he enrolled at TU Braunschweig where he received his PhD in the field of natural product synthesis in organic chemistry. He discovered his passion for chemistry software development during the final phase of his studies by working on the chemistry software Chemograph Plus and the later development of the web database Designer Drugs Online derived from the databank Mass Spectra of Designer Drugs.
Inspired by the thrilling opportunities of digitization in chemistry, Oliver Koepler joined the TIB, where he started developing digital libraries, e-infrastructures, and research data management services for chemistry. His work included text-mining and chemical entity recognition for document discovery, metadata standards, knowledge management systems, and interactive, graphical retrieval processes for research data. He introduced a user-centered design approach applying usability and UX methods for the development of the TIB discovery and delivery service. Since 2019 Oliver Koepler has been head of the Lab Linked Scientific Knowledge, part of the Digital Library and Data Science research group of Prof. Sören Auer at TIB, focussing on knowledge engineering, ontologies, and developing services for research data management. Besides NFDI4Chem current projects include the development of a research data and knowledge management system for two CRCs INF-projects in engineering sciences.
