Henry Rzepa
Encyclopedia
Wandsworth
Wandsworth is a district of south London, England, in the London Borough of Wandsworth. It is situated southwest of Charing Cross. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London.-Toponymy:...
Comprehensive School, and then entered the chemistry department at Imperial College London where he graduated in 1971. Following a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry with Brian Challis, he spent three years in Austin
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...
, Texas with Michael Dewar in the then emerging field of computational chemistry
Computational chemistry
Computational chemistry is a branch of chemistry that uses principles of computer science to assist in solving chemical problems. It uses the results of theoretical chemistry, incorporated into efficient computer programs, to calculate the structures and properties of molecules and solids...
. He returned to Imperial College as a lecturer, one of the first to be appointed in the UK in the new subject of Computational Organic Chemistry, and where he is now Professor of Computational Chemistry.
His research interests directed towards combining different types of chemical information tools for solving structural, mechanistic and stereochemical problems in organic
Organic chemistry
Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation of carbon-based compounds, hydrocarbons, and their derivatives...
, bioorganic
Bioorganic chemistry
Bioorganic chemistry is a rapidly growing scientific discipline that combines organic chemistry and biochemistry. While biochemistry aims at understanding biological processes using chemistry, bioorganic chemistry attempts to expand organic-chemical researches toward biology...
, organometallic chemistry
Organometallic chemistry
Organometallic chemistry is the study of chemical compounds containing bonds between carbon and a metal. Since many compounds without such bonds are chemically similar, an alternative may be compounds containing metal-element bonds of a largely covalent character...
and catalysis
Catalysis
Catalysis is the change in rate of a chemical reaction due to the participation of a substance called a catalyst. Unlike other reagents that participate in the chemical reaction, a catalyst is not consumed by the reaction itself. A catalyst may participate in multiple chemical transformations....
, using techniques such as semiempirical molecular orbital
Molecular orbital
In chemistry, a molecular orbital is a mathematical function describing the wave-like behavior of an electron in a molecule. This function can be used to calculate chemical and physical properties such as the probability of finding an electron in any specific region. The term "orbital" was first...
methods (the MNDO
MNDO
MNDO, or Modified Neglect of Differential Overlap is a semi-empirical method for the quantum calculation of molecular electronic structure in computational chemistry. It is based on the Neglect of Differential Diatomic Overlap integral approximation. Similarly, this method replaced the earlier...
family), NMR
NMR
NMR may refer to:Applications of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance:* Nuclear magnetic resonance* NMR spectroscopy* Solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance* Protein nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy* Proton NMR* Carbon-13 NMR...
spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography
X-ray crystallography
X-ray crystallography is a method of determining the arrangement of atoms within a crystal, in which a beam of X-rays strikes a crystal and causes the beam of light to spread into many specific directions. From the angles and intensities of these diffracted beams, a crystallographer can produce a...
and ab initio
Ab initio quantum chemistry methods
Ab initio quantum chemistry methods are computational chemistry methods based on quantum chemistry. The term ab initiowas first used in quantum chemistry by Robert Parr and coworkers, including David Craig in a semiempirical study on the excited states of benzene.The background is described by Parr...
quantum theories. Aware of the complex semantic issues involved in converging different areas of chemistry to address modern multidisciplinary problems, he started investigating the use of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
as an information and integrating medium around 1987, focusing in 1994 on the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
as having the most potential. Peter Murray-Rust
Peter Murray-Rust
Peter Murray-Rust is a contemporary chemist born in Guildford in 1941.He was educated at Bootham School and Balliol College, Oxford. After obtaining a D.Phil he became lecturer in chemistry at the University of Stirling and was first warden of Andrew Stewart Hall of Residence...
and he first introduced Chemical Markup Language
Chemical Markup Language
CML is an approach to managing molecular information using tools such as XML and Java. It was the first domain specific implementation based strictly on XML, first based on a DTD and later on XML Schema, the most robust and widely used system for precise information management in many areas...
in 1995 as a rich carrier of semantic chemical information and data; and they coined the term Datument as a Portmanteau word to better express the evolution from the Document
Document
The term document has multiple meanings in ordinary language and in scholarship. WordNet 3.1. lists four meanings :* document, written document, papers...
s produced by traditional publishing methods to the Semantic Web
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
ideals expressed by Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
.
His contributions to chemistry include exploration of Mobius
MOBIUS
MOBIUS is a consortium of libraries in Missouri, United States.The MOBIUS Consortium Office is a Missouri not-for-profit corporation established in 1998 by 50 libraries representing Missouri colleges and universities...
aromaticity
Aromaticity
In organic chemistry, Aromaticity is a chemical property in which a conjugated ring of unsaturated bonds, lone pairs, or empty orbitals exhibit a stabilization stronger than would be expected by the stabilization of conjugation alone. The earliest use of the term was in an article by August...
, highlighted by the theoretical discovery of relatively stable forms of cyclic conjugated molecules which exhibit two and higher half-twists in the topology rather than just the single twist associated with Mobius systems (and hence possibly better termed Listing
Johann Benedict Listing
Johann Benedict Listing was a German mathematician.J. B. Listing was born in Frankfurt and died in Göttingen. He first introduced the term "topology", in a famous article published in 1847, although he had used the term in correspondence some years earlier...
rings). He is responsible for unraveling the mechanistic origins of stereocontrol in a variety of catalytic polymerisation reactions, including that of lactide
Lactide
Lactide is the cyclic di-ester of lactic acid, i.e., 2-hydroxypropionic acid. Lactic acid cannot form a lactone as other hydroxy acids do because the hydroxy group is too close to the carboxylic group. Instead, lactic acid first forms a dimer, which is similar to a 5-hydroxyacid...
to polylactide, a new generation of bio-sustainable polymer not dependent on oil. He is also known for the integration of chemistry (in the form of CML
Chemical Markup Language
CML is an approach to managing molecular information using tools such as XML and Java. It was the first domain specific implementation based strictly on XML, first based on a DTD and later on XML Schema, the most robust and widely used system for precise information management in many areas...
) with latest Internet technologies such as RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
and Podcasting
Podcasting
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
, for the introduction of the Chemical MIME
MIME
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions is an Internet standard that extends the format of email to support:* Text in character sets other than ASCII* Non-text attachments* Message bodies with multiple parts...
types in 1994 and for ECTOC, the first electronic-only conferences in organic chemistry
Organic chemistry
Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation of carbon-based compounds, hydrocarbons, and their derivatives...
, which ran from 1995-1998. In 2011 he and Peter Murray-Rust were joint recipients of the Herman Skolnik award of the American Chemical Society .