Management

Dr. Barry Hardy

Founder and CEO

 

Dr. Barry Hardy is the founder and CEO of Edelweiss Connect. He has coordinated the OpenTox project in predictive toxicology and the ToxBank infrastructure development project. He is currently President of the OpenTox Association, founded in 2015 as an international non-profit organisation promoting an open knowledge community approach to new methods in predictive toxicology. He recently led the infrastructure development for the IMI EbiSC stem cell banking project and the eNanoMapper project developing OpenTox solutions supporting nanotechnology safety assessment. New projects include leading OpenRiskNet, knowledge infrastructure development for ACEnano and Eu-ToxRisk and translation of research methods to industrial practice within ToxHQ. He has led the development of research and best practice activities in drug design and toxicology through founding the eCheminfo Community of Practice, InnovationWell and leading the Scientists Against Malaria project.
 
Dr. Hardy obtained his Ph.D. in 1990 from Syracuse University working in computational science. He was a National Research Fellow at the FDA Center for Biologics and Evaluation, a Hitchings-Elion Fellow at Oxford University and CEO of Virtual Environments International. He was a pioneer in the 1990s in the development of Web technology applied to virtual scientific communities and conferences. He has developed technology solutions for internet-based communications, tutor-supported e-learning, laboratory automation systems, and computational science and informatics. In recent years he has also been active in the field of knowledge management as applied to supporting innovation, communities of practice, and collaboration.
 
Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=36113704700

 
Relevant publications:
1. Hardy, B; The Growing Significance of Communities & Collaboration in Discovery & Development, Future Medicinal
Chemistry, Vol 1, Issue 2, Spring 2009.
2. Hardy, B. et al., Collaborative Development of Predictive Toxicology Applications, Journal of Cheminformatics
2010, 2:7, 31 August 2010.
3. Hardy, B., Apic, G., Carthew, P., et al. (2012). A toxicology ontology roadmap. ALTEX 29, 129-137.
4. Hardy, B., Apic, G., Carthew, P., et al. (2012). Toxicology ontology perspectives. ALTEX 29, 139-156.
5. Kohonen, P., …, Hardy, B., “The ToxBank Data Warehouse: Supporting the Replacement of In Vivo Repeated Dose
Systemic Toxicity Testing”, Molecular Informatics, Special Issue: Advances in Computational Toxicology, (2013),
Volume 32, Issue 1, 47–63
6. Leist M, Ghallab A, Graepel R, ..., Hardy B, et al., Adverse outcome pathways: opportunities, limitations and open questions, Arch Toxicol. 2017 Nov; 91(11): 3477-3505.
7. Fadeel B, Farcal L, Hardy B, Vázquez-Campos S, Hristozov D, Marcomini A, Lynch I, Valsami-Jones E, Alenius H,
Savolainen K, Advanced tools for the safety assessment of nanomaterials, Nature Nanotechnology, 2018, DOI:
10.1038/s41565-018-0185-0
 
Book chapters:
1. Doganis P, Tsiliki G, Drakakis G, Chomenidis C, Nymark P, Kohonen P, Grafström R, Abdelaziz A, Farcal L, Exner T,
Hardy B, Sarimveis H. Chapter 11 - Computational Modelling of Biological Responses to Engineered
Nanomaterials. In: Nanotoxicology: Experimental and Computational Perspectives, Editors: Alok Dhawan, Diana Anderson, Rishi Shanker. Royal Society of Chemistry 2017.

 

Dr. Thomas Exner

Chief Scientific Officer

Dr. Thomas Exner is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Edelweiss Connect. Dr. Exner studied chemistry and did his PhD at the Technische Universität Darmstadt followed by a postdoc at the University of Saskatchewan. After 12 years of independent academic research (University of Konstanz, University of Tübingen), he joined the Edelweiss Connect team in 2015. In April 2016, he was named Chief Scientific Officer (CSO). The main research areas he coordinates are data and knowledge management, integrated testing strategies combining alternative in vitro and in silico methods for predictive toxicology and risk assessment as well as approaches to foster collaborative research and community activities. Dr. Exner is the author and co-author of more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed international journals and several other scientific contributions.
 
He is responsible for the scientific planning, execution and supervision of different commercial projects in the area of data management and integrated testing strategy development for risk/safety assessment of chemicals, drugs and nanomaterials. Additionally, he coordinates the H2020 e-infrastructure project OpenRiskNet, is work package leader in the ACEnano project, leads the creation of a knowledge infrastructure in the EU-ToxRisk project as well as functions as principal investigator in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network in3. Dr. Exner is co-chair of the NSC WG-F on Data Management and he leads the WP on the knowledge infrastructure development in ACEnano. 
 
Scopus : https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=35591617400 )
 
Relevant publications:
2. Korb, O.; Stützle, T.; Exner, T. E. “Empirical Scoring Functions for Advanced Protein-Ligand Docking with PLANTS”, J.Chem.Inf Model. 49, 84–96 (2009).
3. ten Brink, T.; Exner, T. E. “The Influence of Protonation States on Protein-Ligand Docking Results”, J.Chem.Inf.Model. 49, 1525-1546 (2009).
4. Dracinsky, M.; Möller, H. M.; Exner, T. E. “ Conformational Sampling by Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Simulations Improves NMR Chemical Shift Predictions”, J. Chem. Theory Comput. 9, 3806–3815 (2013).
5. Sommer, R.; Joachim, I.; Exner, T. E.; Titz, A. “A biophysical study with carbohydrate derivatives explains the molecular basis of monosaccharide selectivity of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa lectin LecB”, PLOS One 9,
e112822 (2014).
6. Victora, A., Möller, H. M.; Exner, T. E. “Accurate Ab Initio Prediction of NMR Chemical Shifts of Nucleic Acids and Nucleic Acids / Protein Complexes”, Nucleic Acids Res. 2014 Dec 16; 42(22): e173
7. Berggren E, White A, Ouedraogo G, Paini A, Richarz A-N, Bois FY, Exner T, et al. Ab initio chemical safety assessment: A workflow based on exposure considerations and non-animal methods. Comput Toxicol. 2017;4:31–44.

Joh Dokler

Chief Technology Officer

Joh Dokler is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Edelweiss Connect, architecting and developing web-based solutions. Mr. Dokler initially studied physics at the University of Ljubljana and computer science at the Josef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia and later obtained his MSc in computing and software engineering through the Open University, UK. He combines his software development skills with his expertise as an information architect to develop sound, solid and data-driven web solutions. He is responsible for architecting and developing software solutions to support a wide array of scientific workflows and tools. This includes data modelling/management/processing as well as cloud- and web-based applications with streamlined APIs and GUIs. He was and is involved in a number of research projects among them EBiSC, OpenRiskNet, ACEnano, NanoCommons and EU-ToxRisk, as well as a number of commercial projects in the field of toxicology. Prior to joining Edelweiss Connect he worked in software development industry in various roles for over 20 years and delivered over 100 successful web-based solutions for government, research and commercial sectors. He is a strong proponent of functional programming languages.