Meet the team

John Boyle, PhD FRSC

John Boyle heads the Data Science team. He has previously worked in both academia and the commercial sectors, he has also published scientific articles on a variety of topics relating to clinical science, bioinformatics, big data, analytics, genomics and proteomics. John's main area of work is in developing and applying statistical inference techniques to help in business analytics and product development.

Jeff White, PhD

Jeff White has a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry, and has worked in scientific publishing for over 20 years. Jeff specialises in XML-related technologies, bulk data handling/conversion and NoSQL systems, and currently his main area of work is in the development of pipelines for the large scale analysis of data from the Royal Society of Chemistry web sites.

Colin Batchelor, DPhil MRSC CChem

Colin Batchelor is a theoretical chemist by training having done his doctorate with Mark Child, and worked at the Royal Society of Chemistry as a technical editor before moving over to work on Project Prospect and ChemSpider before joining the Data Science team. He has published on natural language processing for chemistry, ontologies and cheminformatics.

Peter Corbett, PhD MRSC

Peter Corbett has a background in chemical analytics and literature mining. His PhD from Cambridge was in dynamic combinatorial chemistry, and as part of his postdoctoral work he developed the popular literature extraction toolkit OSCAR. He moved to the Royal Society of Chemistry after working at Linguamatics. Peter's main area of work is in the mining and integration of the large amounts of unstructured data amassed by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Aileen Day, PhD MRSC

Aileen Day (née Gray) has a background in materials science and a PhD in computer modelling at Cambridge University and University College London respectively. She has always worked at the interface between computer programming and science - working in materials and chemistry data management and analysis. Her work aims to use computer technologies to facilitate scientific research, and has covered areas such as ChemSpider, research data and ELNs.

Rita Giordano, PhD

Rita Giordano has a background in Physics and during her PhD developed statistical methods for protein crystallography at the ESRF (European Synchrotron Radiation Facilities).

She held two postdoctoral research positions - one at SLS (Swiss Light Source) and the other at the University of Cambridge. She has also worked in industry as a biostatistician and data analyst before joining the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Tamara Polajnar, PhD MSc

Tamara Polajnar has a background in Computer Science from the University of Northern British Columbia, specialising in Natural Language Processing with an MSc from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD from the Inference Group at the University of Glasgow. She has previously worked at University of Glasgow, National University of Ireland, Galway, and University of Cambridge.