Dr. Engelbert Zass, Head of the Chemistry Biology Pharmacy Information Center at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, will be awarded the Gmelin Beilstein Medal for his outstanding commitment to the field of chemical information, in particular for his work on databases of chemical structures as well as in recognition of the comprehensive training for the practical use of these databases.

The Medal is awarded by the division Chemistry-Information-Computer (CIC) of the German Chemical Society (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh) to chemists who have rendered special services to the history of chemistry, chemical literature, or chemical information.

Engelbert Zass studied chemistry at the University of Cologne, Germany, and received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1977. He spent a year as a research associate in the group of Professor Albert Eschenmoser, ETH Zurich, before becoming Assistant at the Laboratory for Organic Chemistry, ETH Zurich, and responsible for external cooperation of the analysis of chemical literature with the Beilstein-Institut, Frankfurt, Germany. Since then, he has specialized in chemical information and has accumulated more than 25 years experience in searching, operating and designing chemistry databases, as well as in support, training and education of users of chemical information.

He is on the Advisory Boards for several journals and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry.

• Chemistry Biology Pharmacy Information Center, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Gmelin-Beilstein-Denkmünze, Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh, Frankfurt, Germany
• Polymer Backbone Conformation—A Challenging Task for Database Information Retrieval,
  D. Seebach, E. Zass, W. B. Schweizer, A. J. Thompson, A. French, B. G. Davis, G. Kyd, I. J. Bruno,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2009, 48(51), 9596–9598.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.200904422
• Databases of Chemical Reactions,
  Engelbert Zass,
  In Handbook of Chemoinformatics: From Data to Knowledge (Ed. J. Gasteiger),
  Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH, Weinheim, Germany, 2008.
  DOI: 10.1002/9783527618279.ch24
• In Search of Organic Zeolites – Does Modern Information Retrieval Inevitably Become a ‘Sieving-the-Desert’ Exercise?
  E. Zass, D. A. Plattner, A. K. Beck, M. Neuburger,
  Helv. Chim. Acta 2002, 85(11), 4012–4045.
  DOI: 10.1002/1522-2675(200211)85:11<4012::AID-HLCA4012>3.0.CO;2-8