This free webinar will be on Sept 3rd, 2026 14.00 – 15.00 CET.
Please find the information in the invitation below and use this link to register.
Presenters:
- Hans Peter Arp – Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) and Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
- Emma Palm – University of Luxembourg
- Raoul Wolf – Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI)
- Francois Clayer – Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI)
- Huadong Xing – Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa)
This webinar will present how cheminformatics and substance grouping can be used to as effective tools to early identify persistent and mobile substances. The current rapid increase of substances on the global chemical inventory (GCI), associated with the many unknown transformation products related to them, are a primary inspiration for this work. The webinar will feature many ZeroPM researchers, first presenting why substance grouping can be an effective tool for chemical safety regulation and innovation via safe and sustainable by design purposes. This will be followed by cheminformatic approaches to identify potentially persistent and mobile dead-end transformation products (dead-end TPs) of compounds in the GCI. Following this, CUE (chemical-use extraction), a Large Language Model-based transferable framework for automated text mining and entity-pair relationship extraction on the use of chemicals on the GCI will be presented. Finally, using correlations between substance groups and persistent and mobility, as well as dead-end TPs, 15 different substance groups were prioritized as having a high probability of consisting of persistent and mobile substances, or being a precursor to a persistent and mobile dead-end TPs. This list can be the basis for further prioritizing individual substances based on use and monitoring information, as well as toxicity considerations, for follow up within the context of an early warning system or watch list.
About the Presenters
Hans Peter Arp is an environmental chemist at Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) and Professor from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He is the coordinator of ZeroPM, and is in general interest in research that explores multidisciplinary ways to prevent, manage, and reduce pollution exposure. He is also an editor for Environmental Science: Processes and Impacts (since 2024) and sits on the Management Board of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), appointed by the European Parliament.
Emma Palm recently completed her PhD using cheminformatics to identify persistent, mobile substances and transformation products in the Environmental Cheminformatics group at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, University of Luxembourg. Her PhD work includes ShinyTPs, FAIR-TPs (https://fairtps.lcsb.uni.lu/) and GCI-TPs (https://gcitps.lcsb.uni.lu/).
Raoul Wolf is a senior environmental and data scientist at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI), working at the intersection of environmental chemistry, modern statistics and modelling, and regulatory affairs. Within ZeroPM, he has been responsible for constructing the Global Chemical Inventory (https://database.zeropm.eu/).
Francois Clayer is a Senior Environmental Advisor at NGI specializing in interdisciplinary approaches that integrate modelling, data analysis, and environmental chemistry. His work supports the development of innovative tools for environmental risk mitigation.
Huadong Xing is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa). His research focuses on cheminformatics, particularly the use of large language models (LLMs) for text-mining tasks and deep learning methods for molecular discovery.
The full invitation can be found below or downloaded here. Register now! 🙂