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Groom appointed new executive director of CCDC

[CCDC logo]The Board of Governors of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) is pleased to announce that Colin Groom has been appointed as Executive Director of the CCDC as of October 1, 2008, following the retirement of Frank Allen. He is currently Head of Computer-assisted Drug Discovery and Investigative Chemistry at UCB in Cambridge, UK.

[Allen, Groom]Frank Allen (left) and Colin Groom.
Colin Groom has a BSc in biotechnology and a PhD in protein crystallography from the U. of Leeds, and has held postdoctoral appointments at Leeds and at Massey U., New Zealand. Since then, he has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, joining Pfizer Global Research, Sandwich, UK in 1994, where he established a protein crystallography facility, and then established and led the molecular informatics units in both Sandwich and in the USA. He joined UCB (Celltech) in November 2002. He was Co-director of the International School of Crystallography: Molecules to Medicines via Crystallography held in Erice, Italy in May 2008. He has been at the forefront of applying structural information to drug design and has a number of publications and patents in this area. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a member of the British Crystallographic Assn, and has contributed to BBSRC and EPSRC activities as a panel member. He is on the Editorial Boards of Current Computer-Aided Drug Design and Current Drug Discovery Technologies.