Engelbert Zass, retired head of of the Chemistry Biology Information Center at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, has been chosen as recipient of the 2014 Herman Skolnik Award. The award, established in 1976 and named after its first recipient, is given in recognition of outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of chemical information science and related disciplines. It will be presented on August 12, 2014 at the 248th ACS National Meeting & Exposition in San Francisco and includes US$ 3,000 prize money as well as a plaque.

Professor Zass is honored for outstanding contributions and achievements in the practice of chemical information science.

Engelbert Zass studied chemistry at University of Cologne, Germany, and obtained his PhD under the supervision of Professor A. Eschenmoser at the laboratory for organic chemistry, ETH Zürich, Switzerland, in 1977. He stayed at ETH as lecturer and senior scientist and was responsible for external cooperation of the analysis of chemical literature with the Beilstein-Institut, Frankfurt, Germany. Zass significantly contributed to the development of the Chemistry Biology Information Center, ETH Zürich, where he served as head until his retirement in 2012. Zass also was a member of the Advisory Board of the Ullmanns Encyclopedia of Industryl Chemistry from 2007-2009.

He focused on searching, operating and designing chemistry databases, as well as on support, training and education of users of chemical information.

Selected Publications:

• 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, 9596–9598.
  DOI: 10.1002/anie.200904422
• Databases of Chemical Reactions,
  E. Zass,
  Handbook of Chemoinformatics: From Data to Knowledge in 4 Volumes (Ed. J. Gasteiger), Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, Germany, 2008.
  ISBN: 978-3-527-30680-0
• Reaction Databases,
  E. Zass,
  Encyclopedia of Computational Chemistry, 2002.
  ISBN: 978-0-470-84501-1
  
• From Handbooks to Databases on the Net: New Solutions and Old Problems in Information Retrieval for Chemists,
  E. Zass,
  J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 1996, 36, 942–948.
  DOI: 10.1021/ci950249d
• A user’s view of chemical reaction information sources,
  E. Zass,
  J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 1990, 30, 360–372.
  DOI: 10.1021/ci00068a004