Egon Willighagen

Biography

Egon Willighagen studied Chemistry at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands (1993-2001) where he did a minor in organic chemistry at the Department of Supramolecular Chemistry (Prof. R. Nolte) studying the supramolecular agglomeration of amphiphiles with relation to their DNA transfection properties, and a major in chemometrics at the Deparment of Analytical Chemistry (Prof. L.M.C. Buydens) studying the unsupervised classfication of polymorphic organic crystal structures.

He continued his studies on the relation of representation of molecular knowledge and machine learning during his PhD at the same Department of Analytical Chemistry at now-called Radboud University (2002-2006). Taking advantage of his extra-curriculum research in cheminformatics, he worked on on methods to optimize the amount of information gained from pattern recognition methods in the fields of Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSAR), supervised clustering and prediction of properties of organic crystal structures, the general reduction of error introduced in exchange of chemical data, and on improving the reproducibility of data analysis in this field in general. This research was partly performed at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton and the nearby Cambridge University in the United Kingdom (2003, 3 months). The work resulted in the thesis Representation of Molecules and Molecular Systems in Data Analysis and Modeling (2008, ISBN:978-90-9022806-8).

After his PhD research he continued his efforts on reducing the error introduced by data aggregation and cheminformatics toolkits during a year at the Cologne University Bioinformatics Institute in Germany (dr C. Steinbeck) (2006-2007), participating the bioinformatics education (Homology Modeling). He then returned to The Netherlands and did a year at Wageningen University and Research Centre embedded in the Netherlands Metabolomics Center and worked on use of cheminformatics in accurate metabolite identification (2007-2008).

During the past year, Willighagen worked in at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences (Prof. E. Brittebo) strenghtening the cheminformatics knowledge of the Bioclipse and Proteochemometrics Group (Prof. J. Wikberg) at Uppsala University. His research here focuses on linking his cheminformatics research with pharmaceutical and drug discovery research. The goal here is to make the data modeling more insightful, by upscaling of data analysis by using e-Science approaches and the use of semantic markup languages and ontologies which make it possible to link statistical models to external, complementary data sources. This allows linking of patterns between data types and between domains.