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Carl Elkin received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University in 2000 under the supervision of James Hogle, specializing in structure-based drug design. After a brief stint as a software engineer at now-defunct DNA Sciences, he joined Vitae Pharmaceuticals (then called Concurrent) as one of its initial employees. At Vitae, he was responsible for developing software to package the company’s proprietary computational drug design technologies with traditional medicinal chemistry functions into a platform that could be used by medicinal chemists. Dr. Elkin left Vitae when it relocated, and worked at Vertex Pharmaceuticals for one year before joining NeoGenesis Pharmaceuticals, which was purchased by Schering-Plough in 2004. Dr. Elkin is currently the sole computational scientist at Schering-Plough’s 85 person Cambridge site. His job allows him to combine his interest in computational chemistry (especially chemoinformatics) with his interest in software development. His responsibilities include chemoinformatics, structure-based design, HTS support and data analysis, project support, library design and visualization, and tool development.
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Building Knowledge Infrastructure: A Bottom-up Wiki in a Large Company
Carl Elkin, Principal Scientist, Schering-Plough
The extraordinary success of Wikipedia engenders the promise that a similar system might be used within large research organizations. To experiment with this approach, the Cambridge site of Schering-Plough has long been using Spriki, which uses the same free, easily deployable and maintainable software as Wikipedia. Potentially, Spriki can organize information throughout the company, connect people with similar interests but widely separated positions on the org chart, informally archive information and expertise, and provide management a high-level view of ongoing operations, with the ability to drill down as needed.
Spriki has been very useful for some groups, but has not yet achieved company-wide success. A description will be given of the concrete benefits it already provides, including allowing all employees-- even those with no knowledge of HTML-- the ability to create and maintain web-based content, without the expense or maintenance requirements of more sophisticated tools. Reasons for its current success and ongoing challenges will be discussed, along with the characteristics of early and late adopters. Various strategies for encouraging the use of Wikis will also be described and evaluated, including seeding Spriki with useful information, encouraging people to visit Spriki vs. encouraging them to contribute, integration with existing software, working with management to publicize, holding informational meetings, and more.
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