The Chemical Structures Association Trust is pleased to announce that the 2014 Michael Lynch Award is being presented to the "InChI Team" in recognition of their outstanding accomplishments in the conception and development of the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier, InChI.

Initial discussions on the need for a public domain structure representation standard involving Steve Heller and Steve Stein were held in the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1999 and in 2000 Alan McNaught of IUPAC became involved, and it was decided that InChI would be an IUPAC initiative to meet the needs of the chemical and related communities. InChI was originally known as the IUPAC Chemical Identifier in 2001, and the objective was to establish a unique label, which would be a non-proprietary identifier for chemical substances that could be used in printed and electronic data sources thus enabling easier linking of diverse data compilations. This was achieved by developing a set of algorithms for the standard representation of chemical structures that is now readily accessible to chemists in all countries at no cost. The development and associated programming work on version 1 of InChI in 2005 was predominantly carried out by Dmitrii Tchekhovskoi, and in 2008 a shorter hash key version of InChI, known as InChIKey was developed by Igor Pletnev. Subsequent developments since then and ongoing, will be described in the plenary lecture.

In recognition of this important work, the CSA Trust is pleased to present the 2014 Michael Lynch Award jointly to Steve Heller, Alan McNaught, Igor Pletnev, Steve Stein and Dmitrii Tchekhovskoi.