Antony Williams is a Ph.D. NMR spectroscopist and cheminformatician who has worked in academia, government, a Fortune 500 company, and two start-ups. He is co-founder of the chemical database ChemSpider and is now a computational chemist at the US Environmental Protection Agency. He has published over 170 papers and is known as the ChemConnector on social networks. Antony Williams is a Ph.D. NMR spectroscopist and cheminformatician who has worked in academia, government, a Fortune 500 company, and two start-ups. He is co-founder of the chemical database ChemSpider and is now a computational chemist at the US Environmental Protection Agency. He has published over 170 papers and is known as the ChemConnector on social networks. I read the Catalysis piece by Anslyn et al. regarding “Academia and Industry, Continually Blurring Research Roles” with interest. Although I hold overall agreement with many of their viewpoints, especially that a professor’s primary role is to perform the best research possible and to educate, my personal experience over the years has been an increasing shift toward research applications and delivering some specific progress in understanding, or solution to a problem, to industrial partners. I define industry in broad terms—not simply manufacturing or physical products per se but certainly encompassing the new industry of informatics, my own area of research nowadays. My experiences of bridging between industry and academia come from over three decades as a chemist working in academia and government labs, for a Fortune 500 company and a small start-up company (in cheminformatics), as founder of my own start-up, and as vice president for a charity (and publisher). It’s been a diverse career, but in all cases, I have had the opportunity to experience the growing connections between academia and industry, which have become increasingly fuzzy. As an adjunct professor for two universities and someone who has been involved in bridging between academia and industry in a series of job roles, I’ve witnessed the growth of this overlap—the synergies and, in many ways, the dependence between the parties. In my judgment, academic researchers wear many more hats than their industrial counterparts. They run labs, manage budgets and multiple projects on timelines, and need to show impact. On top of all that, however, they have the added charges of teaching, helping to create the next generation of scientists, and needing to maintain their reputation by publishing high-impact science while simultaneously focusing on continually seeking funding, more often than not from industrial partners. My own Ph.D. studies were funded by industrial sponsorship by the Shell Oil Company, and I will remain forever grateful for their support—not only for their monetary contribution but also for the opportunity to spend time in their Thornton research center (now closed, http://www.chesterchronicle.co.uk/news/chester-cheshire-news/shell-close-lab-thornton-research-5193740) and to understand the ramifications and value of my fundamental research to their science. I worked hard for them, and although I believe I delivered against expectations, I was able to also run a number of projects focused on less applied, more pure research “on their dime.” Those projects resulted in a number of scientific publications and deeper understanding for me and delivered legacy benefits to the laboratory in terms of equipment I helped build and software I wrote. For me, at least, I learned to do research and delivered benefits to my industrial sponsors. My postdoctoral position in a government lab in Canada was pure research, highly enjoyable, and very productive. Moving to manage an analytical lab in academia, I landed smack in the middle of an institution that was chasing research funding, commonly from industrial backers, and had many students focused on applications that could ultimately influence commerce. The lines blurred very quickly and, for me, appropriately. Within a couple of years, I was running the NMR spectroscopy facilities for the Eastman Kodak Company, and we funded research relevant to some of our challenges at a number of universities across North America. The expectation was certainly that we contribute to the education of the students involved, but we also managed them to “timelines, expectations, and deliverables,” a language common to any of us in industry and certainly valuable to anyone entering the workforce. This allowed us to take advantage of existing skills and experience and generally run short-term research projects to determine whether they were worth pursuing further either by acquiring additional external funding or by investing and tooling-up in house. Although not all projects panned out successfully, I judge that everyone involved won, especially the students. While at a start-up software company, my colleagues and I formed multiple relationships with academia to our mutual benefit. Occasionally, we would license data from universities under a shared revenue model and would provide software free of charge for researchers to stress-test it and provide feedback on how to improve it; sometimes, we would incorporate algorithms developed in academia for commercial delivery to corporate customers. We collaborated with both academia and industry to deliver, as best we could, best-in-breed software to support researchers. In doing so, we were able to help forge new relationships between parties, learn from both sides, and yes, selfishly move our products and our company forward. As a start-up, our primary focus was that of business impact: to deliver products, grow revenue, expand market share, etc. The researcher in me, married with my drive to have an impact on more than just those who could purchase our wares, had me work on a hobby project. With no funding, lots of night-time work, and simply the drive to provide benefits to the chemistry community, a small group of friends and I built the ChemSpider database and made it freely accessible to the world. After 2 years of growth and no easy way to sustain the system, ChemSpider was acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC, http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2009/ChemSpider.asp) to be provided as a community resource. As a scientific society and publisher, the RSC has very close ties to both academia and industry and works hard to encourage collaboration and partnerships across what is definitely not a divide. Intimate interactions are already in place and are expanding with time as we shift toward a more open scientific culture and share data, source code, and standards to allow for dissemination, integration, and transparency across science. Pharmaceutical companies are contributing large collections of data from behind their firewalls. Efforts such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative (https://www.imi.europa.eu/) out of Europe, to name just one, are facilitating public-private partnerships. For one of these projects I was involved with (OpenPHACTS, http://www.openphacts.org/), a meeting would bring together scientists from pharmaceutical companies, academia, and commercial entities, and every time, students sitting at the table would contribute and feel engaged, respected, and welcomed. It was acknowledged that their immersion in the project included their need to learn and develop their own research, to publish, to expand their horizons, and to contribute as a true team member with, I believe, great success. I talk with a lot of students in science and observe their general acknowledgment that their world is becoming more applied and more increasingly influenced by networking, especially with industry. I rarely experience students working simply for the joy of science; I more generally sense a focus on invention and application and even more commonly on simply developing a publication record (the most common measure of impact in academia) and expanding their CV. Universities should train, support, and encourage their students in a myriad of ways. Certainly, developing their skills as researchers is an imperative. Offering mentorship in terms of how to take their skills “to market,” to develop networks, and to potentially convert their research into commercial offerings or spin-outs should be part of the institutional mandate. Striking an appropriate balance with educating and training future researchers is going to be a challenge in the future. Reaction: Fundamental Science and Academic-Industrial PartnershipsAngela K. WilsonChemAugust 11, 2016In BriefAngela K. Wilson is a physical and theoretical chemist, the director of the Division of Chemistry at the National Science Foundation, and the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Michigan State University. She is a fellow of the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science and a National Associate of the National Academies. Full-Text PDF Open ArchiveCatalyst: Academia and Industry, Continually Blurring Research RolesAnslyn et al.ChemAugust 11, 2016In BriefEric Anslyn (B.S., 1982, CSUN; Ph.D., 1987, Caltech; postdoctoral research fellowship [PDRF], 1987–1989, Columbia University) is the Welch Regents Chair of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. He has received the ACS Cope Scholar Award (2006), Izatt-Christensen Award (2013), ACS Edward Leete Award (2013), and MSMLG Award (2016). Tony James (B.Sc., 1986, University of East Anglia; Ph.D., 1991, University of Victoria; PDRF, 1991–1995, Kyushu University; Royal Society Research Fellowship, 1995–2000, University of Birmingham) is a professor at the University of Bath. He has received the Daiwa-Adrian Prize (2013) and the inaugural CASE Prize (2015). Jonathan L. Sessler (B.S., 1977, UC Berkeley; Ph.D., 1982, Stanford; PDRF, 1982–1984, Université Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg; JSPS Visiting Scholar, 1984, Kyoto University) is the Doherty-Welch Chair of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. He has received the ACS Cope Scholar Award (1991), Izatt-Christensen Award (2001), Southwest Regional ACS Award (2013), MSMLG Award (2014), and Hans Fischer Award (2016). Full-Text PDF Open Archive