006 Dr. Peter Murray-Rust - Promoting Open Science Through Advocacy, Software, & Community Building

DataLab: The Materials Informatics Podcast

Summary: This episode focuses on Dr. Murray-Rust’s work in advocacy, community building, and software development to create a more open scientific community in chemistry and materials.

In this episode, Dr. Bryce Meredig and Prof. Murray-Rust discuss:

• How Peter’s research background in crystallography inspired him to lead the development of tools and communities around open science and open data
• Lessons the materials and chemistry communities can learn from bioscience to create a more open community in scientific publishing
• The impact that open data and open research can have on accelerated industrial materials development
• The role of public funding and policymaking on encouraging a more open scientific community
• The importance of machine-readable data and semantic databases in the physical sciences
• Dr. Murray-Rust’s non-profit Content Mine, which seeks to unlock scientific data through advocacy, community, and software development

“The multiplying factor of the Human Genome Project was over 100x. For every $1 million invested, it led to over $100 million of value created downstream...There’s no doubt that funding these sorts of things leads to a huge amount of realizable public good.” – Dr. Peter Murray-Rust

Dr. Peter Murray-Rust is the Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow Emeritus of Churchill College, where he brings together tools from computer science to chemistry, biosciences and earth sciences, integrating humans and machines in managing information.

Peter has held multiple faculty positions throughout his career, first as a lecturer at the University of Sterling, and later as Professor or Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham. He also led molecular graphics, computational chemistry, and protein structure determination efforts at the Glaxo Group Research.

In addition to his industrial and academic work in chemistry and molecular informatics, Peter is well-known for his support and work on open access and open data. He led the development of the Chemical Markup Language, co-authored the Panton Principles for Open Scientific data, and co-founded the Blue Obelisk community to promote open data and develop open source cheminformatics tools. In 2014, Dr. Murray-Rust was granted a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship in support of his work leading the non-profit ContentMine, where he and his team develops tools to mine literature to make scientific data open and accessible.

Connect with Prof. Murray Rusk:

LinkedIn

Faculty Website

Dr. Bryce Meredig, is the host of DataLab: The Materials Informatics Podcast, and Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Citrine Informatics. Dr. Meredig researches the application of machine learning to materials science. He earned his PhD in materials science from Northwestern University, where he focused on materials informatics, and his BAS and MBA at Stanford University, where he is also on the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He is the author of more than 20 peer-reviewed publications, including some of the earliest on applying machine learning (ML) to materials development. He was an Arjay Miller Scholar and Terman Fellow at Stanford, and a Presidential Fellow and NDSEG Fellow at Northwestern.

Connect with Bryce:

Twitter: @brycemeredig

Website: Citrine.io