Institutional Seminar Series
Tuesday, May 25
via Zoom (Link to be sent morning of)
1:00 p.m. Talks begin w/ Q&A
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Todd Martz - Advancing pH sensor technology through industry-academic partnerships
For over 100 years, a productive partnership between industry and academia has consistently pushed forward the technology used to measure pH. This talk will give an overview of a few key developments along the way, including some of my own experiences in the transfer of knowledge, in both directions, between industry and academia.
Bill Gerwick - Development of NMR Finder, A Start-Up Company Focused on Accelerating Drug Discovery using Artificial Intelligence Tools
One of the bottlenecks in drug discovery efforts is the difficulty encountered in determining the molecular structure of a new compound. This requires sophisticated instrumentation, financial resources, and considerable technical expertise and experience on the part of the researcher. To accelerate this process of compound identification, we trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) using more than 100,000 reference compounds to recognize and annotate molecular structures from their Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrum. This tool, which we call Small Molecular Accurate Recognition Technology (SMART), works remarkably well and significantly accelerates the structure identification of new as well as known molecules. This tool serves as the foundation of a new start-up company, NMR Finder, which aims to provide this capacity to the private sector for accelerating compound annotations. One such biomedical application focuses on providing surgeons near real-time information on the malignant status of tumors during their resection.