Henry Rzepa is Professor of Computational Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London. His entry into the "Internet World" occured around 1987, when as a member of a journal advisory board of the Royal Society of Chemistry, he was asked to consider solutions to the problem of archiving the rich stream of data beginning to emerge in digital form from many articles published in the journal. The CLIC enhanced journal project, which ran during 1995-1997, investigated ways of capturing data in a chemically semantically rich manner and exposing it via journal pages; similar experiments in Electronic conferencing (the ECTOC series, 1995-1998; the Exemplarchem series, 2000-2005) explored how (chemistry) research scientists and students would respond to such environments. During this period, he collaborated with Peter Murray-Rust in developing CML (Chemical Markup Language, 1996-present), which evolved into an extensive set of modular schemas for embedding in Open data-rich environments. Latterly, the focus has been on the meta-data side, providing semantic hooks for enabling the interoperability of these environments into other sciences.
As well as the informatics research, Professor Rzepa has an active program in quantum chemical modelling of important chemical systems and reactions. His recent discoveries include a novel class of conjugated molecules, which exhibit aromaticity arising from higher-twist Mobius rings (actually, paradromic topologies sustaining two or four half twists), and the first unravelling of the origins of polymeric stereo-regularities (tacticities) in new classes of polymerisation reactions designed to use sustainable bio-resources rather than geochemical stocks such as oil.